australian journal of adult learning

Transcription

AustraliaN Journal of
ADULT LEARNING
Volume 52 n Number 3 n November 2012
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ADULT LEARNING
The Australian Journal of Adult Learning (formerly the Australian Journal of Adult and
Community Education) is an official publication of Adult Learning Australia (ALA). It is
concerned with the theory, research and practice of adult and community education, and to
promote critical thinking and research in this field. Its prime focus is on Australia, though
papers relating to other contexts are also sometimes published. Papers in the refereed section
of the Journal have been blind peer reviewed by at least two members from a pool of specialist
referees from Australia and overseas.
Editor: Professor Roger Harris, Adult and Vocational Education,
School of Education, University of South Australia
Mawson Lakes Boulevard, Mawson Lakes, South Australia 5095.
Email: roger.harris@unisa.edu.au
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Associate Professor Michele Simons, Dr Tom Stehlik, Dr Peter Willis
Editorial Board: Dr Allan Arnott, Northern Territory University; Professor Mary Barrett,
University of Wollongong, NSW; Dr Helen Bound, Institute for Adult Learning,
Singapore; Dr Sarojni Choy, Griffith University; Dr Michael Christie, Chalmers
University of Technology, Sweden; Dr Jane Connell, Cape Breton University,
Canada; Professor Patricia Cranton, Penn State Harrisburg, USA; Dr Leona English,
St Francis Xavier University, Canada; Professor Ian Falk, Northern Territory
University; Professor Brian Findsen, The University of Waikato, NZ; Mr Vaughn
John, University of Natal, South Africa; Dr Helen Kimberley, Brotherhood of
St. Laurence, Victoria; Professor Thomas Deissinger, Konstanz University,
Germany; Ms Dorothy Lucardie, Pharmaceutical Society of Australia; Ms Veronica
McGivney, National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, UK; Dr John
McIntyre, University of Technology, Sydney; Associate Professor Sue Shore, Charles
Darwin University; Dr Joyce Stalker, University of Waikato, NZ; Dr Benjamin Chan
Tak Yuen, University of Hong Kong.
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ISSN: 1443-1394
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Volume 52, Number 3, November 2012
419 Introduction: Why food? Why pedagogy? Why adult education?
Guest editors: Rick Flowers and Elaine Swan
Refereed articles
434 School food and the pedagogies of parenting
Jo Pike and Deana Leahy
460 Throw your napkin on the floor: Authenticity, culinary tourism,
and a pedagogy of the senses
Lisa Stowe and Dawn Johnston
484 A critical race and class analysis of learning in the organic
farming movement
Catherine Etmanski
507 Food pedagogies in Japan: From the implementation of the
Basic Law on Food Education to Fukushima
Cornelia Reiher
532 Pedagogies of doing good: Problematisations, authorities,
technologies and teleologies in food activism
Rick Flowers and Elaine Swan
Contents
573 Educational alternatives in food production, knowledge and
consumption: The public pedagogies of Growing Power and
Tsyunhehkw
Pierre Walter
595 When traditions become innovations and innovations become
traditions in everyday food pedagogies
Helen Benny
617 ‘Savoir fare’: Are cooking skills a new morality?
John Coveney, Andrea Begley and Danielle Gallegos
Australian Journal of Adult Learning
Guest editorial
Introduction:
Why food? Why pedagogy? Why adult education?
University of Technology, Sydney
We convened this special issue on Food pedagogies to start to
address what we saw as lacunae in both research on adult education
and food studies. Thus, in spite of the expanding body of work on
informal learning and pedagogies amongst adult educators, food
as an object, site, target and ‘technology’ of education and learning
has been relatively neglected (see Cook 2009, Jubas 2011 and
Sumner 2011, for exceptions). This is somewhat surprising as many
food studies academics argue: the growing, buying, preparing,
provisioning, cooking, tasting, eating and disposing of food have
become the target of intensified pedagogical activity across a range
of domains (Kimura 2011; Short 2006; Coveney 2006). Hence, many
different ‘pedagogues’ – policy makers, churches, activists, health
educators, schools, tourist agencies, celebrities, chefs – think we
don’t know enough about food and what to do with it. ‘Technologies’
420 Rick Flowers and Elaine Swan
of learning and teaching about food range from cookbooks, to lifestyle and cooking programmes, health promotion projects, recipe
cards in supermarkets, food labelling, grower’s markets, nutrition
guides and community gardens. This means that we could argue that
adult educators can include: retailers, farmers, chefs, people who
cook at home, public health practitioners, advertisers, food writers
and ‘foodies’. Some of the groups involved in food pedagogies are
powerful actors with clear educational aims and intents and they
include the food industry, health authorities, nutritionists, research
scientists, advertisers and media chefs.
In the interdisciplinary field of food studies - which includes
geography, anthropology, history, and sociology - terms such as
pedagogy and learning have been invoked to denote proliferations
and intensifications of, and shifts in, expertise and knowledge about
food. There has also been discussion on the politics of these new sites
and formats of education but with relatively little focused theoretical
or empirical exploration on the nature of the pedagogies themselves
(see also Noble 2004). In contrast, there is a growing literature on
‘public pedagogy’ which seeks to examine education and learning
outside of the classroom as performed through institutions, signs
and media which, we argue, can help us typologise and classify
contemporary processes of teaching people about food. This literature
can help us prise open the pedagogical aims, content, mechanism,
effects and relations of different food teaching, education and
learning. Thus, we can start to analyse:
• the specificities of ‘technologies’ of teaching about food: from cooking
programs, food labelling, grower’s markets, and nutrition guides;
• the pedagogues who claim to ‘educate’ us about food, which now
includes a growing litany of cultural intermediaries / occupational
groups such as farmers, chefs, food writers, food bloggers, health
practitioners and advertisers;
Introduction 421
• government and corporate organisations such as local councils,
health agencies, food advocacy groups, and supermarkets;
• media such as women’s magazines, internet sites, online short
films, recipe repositories, activist newsletters and food labels; and
• policy instruments such as national food plans, labelling
guidelines, and nutrition edicts.
Hence, we can now argue that the food ‘classroom’ can be the farm,
TV, garden, and online short films. Our bodies, senses, mouths, eyes,
tongues, stomachs, noses and hands, have all become the targets of
teaching, and even teachers in their own right, across diverse food
curricula. Drawing on a range of political and theoretical perspectives,
the collection of papers in this special issue seeks to analyse the
cultural politics of food pedagogies by examining pedagogical content,
techniques, relations, curricula; and constructions of teachers and
learners across a number of empirical sites and regional contexts.
To date, the term itself - food pedagogies - has had very little
circulation in adult education and wider social theory, although it
is beginning to get some traction. In the field of adult education,
Jennifer Sumner in Canada is one of the first to deploy it in her
teaching at the University of Toronto where it is a Masters level
adult education subject. In 2009, the influential American food
studies theorist, Associate Professor Julie Guthman, who has written
some of the most challenging research on race, class, gender and
food reform, uses the term ‘radical food pedagogy’ in an interview
entitled ‘On Globalisation, Neoliberalism, Obesity, Local Food and
Education’ in the online journal Politics and Culture. In the interview,
she argues that a radical food pedagogy would interrogate why
food is being studied by students from privileged backgrounds. We
ourselves only started to use the term in 2011 as a core concept in
our research, with a number of seminars, and in the call for papers
for this special issue, and subsequent journal papers (see reference
list). In 2009 a symposium entitled Food Pedagogy was held in
Berlin by two Norwegian health and sports academics but focusing
on more traditional use of the term in relation to training teachers
in food, sports and health studies (Palovaara-Soberg & Thuv 2009).
There has been some use of the term in relation to schools; so in the
USA, Jessica Hayes-Conroy (2009) who has published on visceral
fieldwork, focused on school gardens for her doctorate and chapter
six was entitled food pedagogy; in Australia, Monica Green has
published on school gardens and pedagogies of food (2008: 11).
Activists are also beginning to use the term; for example, there is
reference on a web site for an ecologically sustainable farm in the
USA, called Ecotone. The term bio-pedagogy - after Foucault’s term
biopower - has been used for some time in relation to concerns about
the so-called obesity epidemic and associated educational initiatives,
particularly in schools, led by Jan Wright in Australia who set up a
bio-pedagogies research consortium in 2007 and co-edited a book
in 2009 (Wright & Harwood 2009). More recently, Emma Rich
(2011) also writing about obesity on reality TV uses the term public
pedagogy.
Of courses, assertions about what constitutes the ‘right’ food curricula
vary across these widely different pedagogies. As the papers by Helen
Benny, John Coveney, and Jo Pike and Deana Leahy in this special
issue argue, according to public health practitioners, policy makers,
teachers and TV chefs, one area that is deemed to require educational
intervention is ‘food skills,’ which are widely imagined to be on the
decline, particularly in the case of working class mothers; whereas, for
so-called ‘foodies,’ good ‘taste’ is associated with caring about certain
classed and racialised ‘food knowledge’ and learning about novel
food, restaurants and ingredients (Johnston and Baumann 2010). For
ethical and sustainable food activists, their concern is that we need
to understand the provenance of our food. And in the ‘locavore’ food
movement, knowing who made your food and where it hails from is
seen as a political and moral citizenship imperative.
Introduction 423
Not only is food an object of learning, but it is also a vehicle for
learning. So food studies emphasises food consumption as a cultural,
place-based, relational and social practice. As a range of food theorists
(for example, Lupton 1996, Jackson 2009, Bell and Valentine 2006)
argue food consumption involves social relationships, kinship and
intimate relations, collective identities, gift exchange, and social
interaction. This body of work underscores the importance of
understanding the role of affect, bodies, desire, fantasy, memory,
ethics, risk, anxiety, and family relations in food culture. How then
might these play out in relation to food pedagogies in gendered,
classed and racialised ways? There has also been a turn to sensory
pedagogy emphasising how taste, touch and smell are critical to
learning about food and culture, but are also not acultural and are
classed, gendered and racialised (Sutton 2001). In relation to race,
food is often seen by policy makers, tourist agencies and educators
as ‘multicultural pedagogy’, a practice of intercultural bonding.
The politics of what has been called ‘colonial food adventuring’
and ‘eating the other’ is much debated (Duruz 2005; Flowers &
Swan 2012; Heldke 2003). These analyses from food studies raise
important issues for adult education scholarship about the pedagogic
sites, processes, relations and politics of doing gender, bodies, class,
race, citizenship, ethics and family through food consumption, food
preparation, and food rituals, and the way these are taught and
learned across a range of sites, public and everyday pedagogies,
informal and formal educational practices and technologies.
In sum, then, commentators assert that through food we are taught
about power, culture, bodies, gender, class, race, status, identity,
pleasure, pain, labour, health, morality, our place in the world; as is
often said, ‘who and what we are’. Across food pedagogies then we
have different pedagogic regimes, pedagogic encounters, politics,
inequalities and educator-learner relations. Of course in all of this,
there is a politics to who is seen as in need of educating and who is set
up as ‘in the know’.
Of course, we could refer to terms such as ‘food education’, ‘food and
informal learning’ or ‘food literacies’. But we prefer the term ‘food
pedagogy’ for a variety of reasons? So why the term ‘pedagogy’? In
the past ten years, social theorists have turned to the analytic tool
of ‘pedagogy’ using it in a broader sense beyond classroom teaching
practices in schools and universities to examine the proliferation and
intensification of teaching, learning, curricula, training and education
outside of educational institutions (Luke 1996; Hickey-Moodey,
Savage & Windle 2010; Flowers & Swan, 2012; Swan 2012). We
might say there is a pedagogical turn. But following Carmen Luke’s
work (1996) we conceptualise pedagogy on different terms than in
traditional educational theory where typically pedagogy is defined
in terms of formal curricula, classroom processes and educational
institutions. Instead we define pedagogy as the sites, processes and
technologies of learning and teaching that happen outside of formal
educational systems (Sandlin, Schultz & Burdick 2010; Luke 1996).
Pedagogical sites are now seen to include mass media, popular
culture, museums, art galleries, public policy projects, welfare
institutions, health, community activities, reality TV, psy practices,
the internet, screen technologies and media, and social networking
sites. The term ‘public pedagogy’ is used to refer to ‘top down’
educative influences through cultural forms and ‘bottom up’ teaching
and learning in communities, hobby groups and social movements
(Sandlin et al. 2010); ‘everyday’ pedagogy is used by feminists to
explore the gendering processes in the home and family (Luke, 1992)
and ‘cultural pedagogies’ to refer to ‘learning’ about social axes of
difference (Hickey-Moodey, Savage & Windle 2010). Informal sites
of learning now include popular culture, museums, the internet,
magazines, social movements, mass media, social media and the
home (Luke 1996; Sandlin, Schultz & Burdick 2010; Ellsworth 2005;
Giroux 2004; Swan 2009 & 2012).
We use the term ‘food pedagogies’ because it is capacious enough
to denote a range of sites, processes, curricula, ‘learners’ and even
Introduction 425
types of human and non-human ‘teachers’ but tight enough to refer
to some kind of intended or emergent change in behaviour, habit,
emotion, cognition, and/or knowledge at an individual, family, group
or collective level. Thus, we use the term to mean more than the
extension of sites of learning to the outside of classrooms. Pedagogy
also implies but does not define a priori the power relations involved
in educative and learning technologies and processes. Part of the
analysis of the politics of pedagogies involves locating them within
wider social, cultural and political relations of power. Thus Carmen
Luke emphasises that pedagogy cannot be conceived as an isolated
inter-subjective event where one analyses the dyadic relations of
teaching and learning: rather it ‘is fundamentally defined by and
a product of a network of historical, political, sociocultural, and
knowledge relations’ (1996: 130). ‘Food pedagogies’ refer to a
congeries of education, teaching and learning about how to grow,
shop for, prepare, cook, display, taste, eat and dispose of food by
a range of agencies, actors and media; and aimed a spectrum of
‘learners’ including middle class women, migrants, children, parents,
shoppers, and racially minoritised and working class mothers. We
know that the term ‘food pedagogies’ has clear resonance with adult
education scholars because there were 29 abstracts submitted to the
special issue.
In this special issue and future research, including a forthcoming
edited book on Food pedagogies (Flowers & Swan 2013), we intend to
interrogate the multiple conceptualisations of food, skills, knowledges
and expertise across a range of fields of practices, domains and
contexts and to delineate the particularity of their teaching
technologies, educational aims, content, curricula and constructions
of teachers and learners. Our aim always is to identify the politics of
food pedagogies. It is also the focus for all of the papers in this special
issue, although they define politics in different ways.
In their paper on ‘School food and the pedagogies of parenting’, Jo
Pike from the University of Leeds in the UK and Deana Leahy from
Southern Cross University in Australia examine how mothers are
morally positioned in relation to formal and informal food pedagogies
and school food in classed and gendered ways. They undertook
ethnographic research in classrooms and school dining rooms;
interviews with head teachers and school-meals staff, and employed
participatory methods with children aged 4-6 and 10-11 in Australia
and the UK. Working through Foucault’s notion of governmentality,
they focus, in particular, on what they refer to as the ‘pedagogies of
the school lunchbox’ – an ‘assemblage of governmental techniques
and strategies’ – through which governments attempt to direct certain
types of mothers – working class mothers - to include or remove
certain foods and drinks from their children’s lunches. Arguing
that much current literature on food pedagogies in schools focuses
on children, they focus their attention on the pedagogies which are
‘pedagogicalising parents.’ In particular they show how the so-called
obesity epidemic has rendered the lunchbox, and working class
mothers, the subject of intense surveillance. Their conclusion is that
these school food pedagogies are forms of moral regulation which
pathologise working class mothers as unhealthy and less capable at
looking after their children’s food and health.
Shifting to a different country, institutional site and learner, the
next paper, ‘Throw your napkin on the floor: Authenticity, culinary
tourism, and a pedagogy of the senses’, by Lisa Stowe and Dawn
Johnston from the University of Calgary in Canada, turns to the
politics of culinary tourism on their third year undergraduate subject
Food culture in Spain which involves taking students to Spain for
a three-week trip. In their paper, they analyse the formal, informal
and incidental learning, and in particular, the sensory learning that
the undergraduates experience eating in city and rural restaurants
and bars, and visiting a family-run olive press. Drawing on the
students’ assessments and interviews with students, Stowe and
Introduction 427
Johnston carefully interrogate the concepts of ‘eating the other’ and
‘authenticity’ – which are much debated concepts in food studies,
particularly in relation to the power dynamics of consuming ethnic
foods. They show how the students learn new ways to eat, shop and
cook back in Canada as a result of cognitive and bodily learning in
Spain. In particular, through sensory pedagogies of tasting olives,
raspberry sorbet and salty tuna for the first time, drinking in noisy
crowded bars and seeing olive oil being pressed, the students actively
and critically reflect on what it means to define Spanish culture and
food, and their own tourist experiences as authentic.
The next paper, entitled ‘A critical race and class analysis of learning
in the organic farming movement’ by Catherine Etmanski from
Royal Roads University in Canada, brings in new pedagogical actors:
she shows how organic farmers are educators; activists are learners;
and farms are pedagogical sites. Taking forward the theme of class
analysis introduced by Pike and Leahy, Etmanski argues, using
critical race theorists, and food studies theorists Julie Guthman and
Rachel Slocum, that we need to attend to whiteness, privilege and
race in the organic food movement. Positioning herself as an adult
educator committed to social justice, Etmanski is keen to ask how
anti-racist and Indigenous Rights perspectives might be brought to
bear on the small-scale organic farming pedagogical initiative. The
paper is based on ethnographic work she undertook as an apprentice
on farms, engaging in a particular kind of learning, getting her
hands dirty and being taught about crop diversity, permaculture,
animal welfare and soil health. Her main question is how the
Eurocentric organic farming movement can learn from and work
with the Indigenous food sovereignty movements in Canada but also
internationally.
From Canada and the organic farming movement and its farmereducators, we now turn to Japan and its recent law, ‘shokuiku
kihonhō’, which aims to reform food production and consumption
through food pedagogies. This is discussed in a paper by Cornelia
Reiher from the University of Halle in Germany, entitled ‘Food
pedagogies in Japan: From the implementation of the Basic Law
on Food Education to Fukushima’. Reiher’s main focus is two-fold:
to examine how the Fukushima nuclear disaster has affected food
knowledge being promulgated by the government. She argues that
knowledge about food safety from consumer co-ops and radioactivity
measurement has been marginalised in official food pedagogies. Her
overall argument is that the food law focuses too much on domestic
food producers, nutrition and cooking and reproduces the view that
Japanese food is safer than imported food. She sums up her paper
by concluding that the Japanese state leaves consumers with an
impoverished knowledge about food safety.
In our paper (Rick Flowers and Elaine Swan) which we have
called ‘Pedagogies of doing good: Problematisations, authorities,
technologies and teleologies in food activism’, we analyse data from a
roundtable we organised with food activist educators from Australia,
using a framework from Nikolas Rose. Our paper has two aims: first
to add a new framework as a means for analysing adult education
and learning approaches to draw attention to different kinds of power
in educational work, and secondly, to use it to commence a metaanalysis of food activist pedagogies in particular. Using Rose’s work,
we focus of the politics of ‘doing good’, how educators legitimate
and authorise their pedagogical efforts. Applying the framework in a
detailed and concrete way to three types of food activist pedagogies,
we examine the diversity of knowledges about food, health and
education they drew on and what these mean for how ‘doing good’
relates to race, gender and class in relation to food and learning.
Pierre Walter, from the University of British Columbia in Canada,
turns our attention to adult learning sites in the food movement
in USA, in his paper entitled ‘Educational alternatives in food
production, knowledge and consumption: The public pedagogies of
Introduction 429
Growing Power and Tsyunhehw^. Building on Etmanski’s concern
that organic farming pedagogies have not attended to issues of race
and class sufficiently, Pierre analyses two alternative food initiatives
based in Wisconsin in the US: Growing Power, an urban farm in an
impoverished African American neighbourhood, and Tsyunhehkw^,
an integrated food system of the Native American Oneida Nation.
Drawing on site visits, documentary analysis and digital research,
Walter analyses the production of an ‘imagined public pedagogy’
across these media. He argues that these initiatives constitute antiracist, decolonising public pedagogies which disrupt the whiteness
and middle-class foundations of food movements. While this is an
important step forward, he concludes by asking, however, how much
they have attended to gender oppression in their educational work.
The next paper – ‘When traditions become innovations and
innovations become traditions in everyday food pedagogies’ –
by Helen Benny from Swinburne University of Technology in
Australia, continues to ask questions about the relationship between
food, learning and ethnicity. The pedagogical spaces she focuses on
are the domestic, work and leisure settings in Melbourne, Australia.
Utilising a perspective termed ‘everyday multiculturalism’ (Wise &
Velayutham 2009) which looks at the lived experience of diversity
on the ground in everyday encounters, as opposed to state and policy
ordained multiculturalism, Benny explores the food memories of
three Australian women. They are Nadia, Anita and Simone who are
of different ages and ethnicities. Benny examines the dynamics of
tradition and innovation in ‘ethnic’ cooking and eating through what
she terms pedagogies of innovation and pedagogies of preservation.
This focus offers insights into the nature of everyday learning
processes in ‘ethnic’ cultures and food traditions.
The final paper is by John Coveney, Andrea Begley and
Danielle Gallegos, food historians of nutrition at three Australian
universities. In this paper, ‘Savoir Fare: Are cooking skills a new
morality?’, the authors build on the body of work using Foucauldian
analyses of nutritional approaches as forms of governmentality over
the twentieth and twenty-first century. They use the term ‘savoir
fare’ to get at the types of authoritative knowledges which are seen to
constitute the expert endorsed know-how and know-what-about of
cooking in the US, UK and Australia. Historicizing the idea currently
circulating in health, education and public policy that cooking
skills are on the decline, they argue that there is a proliferation of
social technologies such as food literacy programs and cooking TV
programs which position cooking skills as life skills. These are not
just food pedagogies though, but constitute moral pedagogies which
define what constitutes ‘good cooking.’ And they argue the result
is a powerful food and family morality that is both ‘disciplined and
disciplinary’.
How does a focus on food pedagogies open up how we conceptualise
and research adult education and adult learning? We can see
through the special issue that it enables us to enrich the depth of
our understanding of informal learning and the sites and processes
through which education and learning take place from the kitchen to
the TV to the school lunch. Theoretical perspectives in food studies
bring new vocabularies, concepts, methodologies into dialogue
with current thinking in adult education. It provides us with clear
examples of educational work to do with food across a rich set of sites
and methods. In this special issue, we can see how authors draw on
digital research, media analysis, Foucauldian influence analytics,
historical and documentary research and ethnographic methods.
Future research in adult education and food studies could investigate
the reception of these aims by ‘intended learners’ in closer detail.
Introduction 431
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank
• R
oger Harris, editor of the Australian Journal of Adult Learning,
for supporting this special issue and his editorial advice
• t he Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Cosmopolitan Civil
Societies Research Centre, University of Technology, Sydney for
funding our ‘food pedagogies’ research
• G
reg Noble, University of Western Sydney, for conversations and
his unpublished papers about the concept of pedagogy
• Jennifer Sumner for her pioneering work in this field
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School food and the pedagogies of parenting
Jo Pike
University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Deana Leahy
Southern Cross University, Australia
Over the past decade the issue of food and in particular, food
consumed within schools has come to encapsulate a broad range
of concerns regarding children and young people’s health and
wellbeing. In Australia, the UK and more recently the USA, attempts
to ameliorate a range of public health concerns have provided the
impetus for an unprecedented proliferation of school food initiatives
and legislative reforms governing the types of foods that may or
may not be provided within schools. While academic enquiry in this
area has largely focussed upon attempts to govern children, recent
initiatives in the UK and Australia have begun to target parents in
their attempts to promote healthy food practices. In this paper we
interrogate the ways in which parents, or more specifically, mothers
are positioned in relation to school food discourses in Australia
and in the UK and suggest that school food has become a site
through which an array of pedagogical opportunities are opened
Jo Pike and Deana Leahy 435
up to invoke particular subject positions premised on normative
views of affective middle class motherhood. In short, we seek to
explore the means through which mothers come to be regarded as
legitimate targets of school food pedagogy. The paper draws on
empirical data from Australia and the UK to compare a range of
pedagogic techniques employed in the two countries. Drawing on
governmentality studies we explore how school food pedagogies
seek to regulate mothers and their children’s food related choices.
We consider school lunches and the various techniques that have
been deployed in both countries to consider the moralising work that
takes place around food and motherhood.
Introduction
Over the last decade the issue of school food has dominated the public
health agenda across the higher OECD countries such as Australia,
the UK and more recently the USA. School food and the myriad
initiatives related to healthy eating have provided a forum through
which concerns over the future health and wellbeing of children are
articulated. As such, the recent campaign of celebrity chef, Jamie
Oliver to improve both the nutritional quality and the aesthetic
appeal of school lunches has become part of the dominant discourse
surrounding school meals and has been recognised as an influential
factor in mobilising public opinion. However, the preoccupation with
school food is characteristic of far wider concerns about the condition
of modern childhood; concerns which are embedded within specific
ways of thinking about women, class and the family (Gustafsson,
2002).
While policy and political discourses configure responsibility for
the feeding of children in gender neutral terms through the use of
the word parent, it is acknowledged that any analysis of feeding
practices necessarily entails thinking about motherhood and
femininity (De Vault, 1991; Lupton, 1996; Warin et al., 2008). Such
analyses point to the positioning of women as responsible guardians
of future generations (Maher et al., 2010) while others have argued
that it is specific groups of women, namely the poor that carry the
burden of blame for jeopardising the health, education and potential
productivity of future citizens (Gillies, 2007; Walkerdine & Lucey,
1989). In terms of parenting, ‘Working class mothering practices
are held up as the antithesis of good parenting, largely through their
association with poor outcomes for children’ (Gillies, 2007:2). In
relation to school food, working class women are constituted through
media and governmental discourse as lacking in taste, education
and morality and this is constructed in opposition to the normative
position of effective middle class motherhood. Thus while children
and teachers have previously been considered legitimate targets of
school food education (Leahy, 2009; Pike, 2010; Vander Schee, 2009)
contemporary policy and practice is predicated on the imperative to
‘educate’ mothers with regard to feeding their children. While there
are many different spaces that perform this work, it is the role of
schools, as appropriate sites for the ‘pedagogicalisation’ of parents
that is the focus of this paper.
Throughout this paper we interrogate the ways in which parents,
or more specifically, mothers are positioned in relation to school
food discourses and pedagogies in Australia and in England and
suggest that school food has become a site through which an array
of pedagogical opportunities are opened up to invoke particular
subject positions premised on normative views of affective middle
class motherhood. We do not attempt to illustrate how mothers
take up these subject positions or the impact of these pedagogies on
mothering practices. Rather we are interested to explore the means
through which mothers come to be regarded as necessary targets of
school food pedagogy and how these pedagogies are designed to enlist
parents into a moral project of the self.
The paper draws on empirical data from two ethnographic studies
undertaken in schools in Australia and England to illustrate the
pedagogic techniques and strategies employed in the two countries.
In England data were generated in four primary schools in the north
of England between 2006 and 2007 using established ethnographic
methods such as observations in dining rooms and classrooms,
interviews with teachers, head teachers and school meals staff and
participatory work with children aged 4-6 years and 10-11 years.
Methods used with children included photography projects, draw
and write activities, mapping exercises and modelling and role play.
In the Australian study, data were generated from 3 secondary
schools in Victoria using a range of ethnographic methods including,
observations of health education lessons and interviews with teachers,
together with a critical analysis of health education curriculum
documents and teaching resources.
Initially, we outline the theoretical terrain that frames our analysis
before providing an account of contemporary school food policy in
both England and Australia. We then proceed to delineate some of
the ways that formal and informal school food pedagogies, attempt
to shape mothers’ fields of action illustrating this with reference
to pedagogies of the school lunchbox. The school lunchbox can
be regarded as an intersectional space in which an assemblage of
governmental techniques and strategies, emanating from a variety
different sources, converge. We suggest that such pedagogical
practices perform governmental work that is explicitly moral and as
such, entices mothers to engage in practices of self-formation centred
around notions of effective motherhood. Finally, we conclude by
suggesting some of the outcomes of such approaches using the ‘Battle
of Rawmarsh’ as an example of a critical incident in England where
mothers resisted attempts to transform their children’s school food
and were subsequently vilified by the media and celebrities such as
Jamie Oliver.
Governing food: the role of school food pedagogies
In order to understand the proliferations of school food pedagogies,
and in turn how they work to govern parental food practices we
draw on the field of Foucauldian inspired governmentality studies.
Foucault defined government as ‘the conduct of conduct’ stating that
government relates to the ‘way in which the conduct of individuals
or groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of
communities, of families, of the sick … to govern in this sense, is to
structure the possible field of action’ (Foucault, 1982: 220-221). His
various analyses of government explored questions related to how
conduct, and attempts to shape conduct, were imagined and enacted
within different historical epochs, states and sites (Gordon, 1991).
For the purposes of this paper, we seek to understand the role that
contemporary school food pedagogies play in attempting to structure
parents, and specifically mothers, possible fields of action. According
to Mitchell Dean (2010: 18) government refers to:
…any more or less calculated and rational activity, undertaken by
a multiplicity of authorities and agencies, employing a variety of
techniques and forms of knowledges, that seeks to shape conduct
by working through our desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs,
for definite but shifting ends and with a diverse set of relatively
unpredictable consequences, effects and outcomes.
Within this context we understand school food pedagogies to work as
governmental devices that provide a ‘contact point’ for government
(Burchell, 1996) that connects questions of government, politics, and
administration to the space of bodies, lives, selves and persons (Dean,
2010: 20). In essence school food pedagogies provide government
with an opportunity to explicitly shape, sculpt, mobilize and work
through the food choices, desires and aspirations, needs, wants and
lifestyles of parents, families and children. The explicit intention of
food pedagogies is to enlist parents into a process of ‘governmental
self formation’
Significantly though, Dean (2010: 19) suggests that any attempt to
govern, and hence the various food pedagogies that circulate are
accompanied by moral imperatives. He states that:
…the rational attempt to shape conduct implies another feature of
this study of government: it links with moral questions. If morality
is understood as the attempt to make oneself accountable for one’s
own actions, or as a practice in which human beings take their
own conduct to be subject to self-regulation then government is an
intensely moral activity … It is a moral enterprise as it presumes
to know with varying degrees of explicitness and using specific
forms of knowledge, what constitutes good, virtuous, appropriate,
responsible conduct of individuals.
Therefore we must consider the ways in which these moral
imperatives are used to shore up school food pedagogies and the ways
that mothers in particular are rendered accountable for the decisions
they take about how, when, where and what to feed their children.
School food policy
In both England and Australia, school food has been situated within
the public health policy landscape, most notably in relation to the
perceived threat of rising levels of childhood overweight and obesity
(Department of Health, 2004; Department of Health, 2008; Gard &
Wright, 2005; Rich, 2010; Vander Schee & Gard, 2011). In England
the importance of campaigns to improve the nutritional quality of
school food was highlighted:
Amongst children obesity is growing at a rapid, indeed alarming,
rate. This is the reason why campaigns like those run by Jamie
Oliver on School Dinners are not a passing fad, they are central to
the nation’s future health. (Tony Blair, 26 July, 2006)
Aside from the explicitly nationalistic overtones in this quotation,
the discursive construction of childhood obesity as ‘alarming’ an
‘epidemic’ or ‘ticking time bomb’ is problematic to say the least
(Campos, 2004; Gard & Wright, 2005; Evans, 2006). Nevertheless
the positioning of childhood obesity within this discursive framework
has provided a rationale to legitimise a range of interventions
designed to encourage subjects to make healthier lifestyle choices
(Burrows, 2009; Leahy, 2009; Rich, 2010; Vander Schee, 2009). In
Australia and England, this governmentalisation has worked in two
ways; first by limiting individuals’ fields of action, by curtailing the
types of food available to pupils at school and second, by encouraging
pupils to act upon themselves as healthy subjects. The former relates
to the regulation of the types of foods that can and cannot be served
at school. In Australia guidance based, primarily on food groups was
published through the National Guidelines for healthy food and
drinks supplied in school canteens (Commonwealth of Australia,
2010) with some variation in terms of implementation between
particular states, (https://healthy-kids.com.au/page/107/other-statecanteen-strategies) many of which had developed their own set of
guidelines prior to this Federal initiative. In England, nutrient based
standards stipulate that school lunches should contain minimum or
maximum amounts of 14 different nutrients (Statutory Instrument
2007 No. 2359).
In both Australia and England students are able to go home for lunch,
bring a lunch from home, or purchase in lunch in the school canteen.
English school lunches typically comprise of different hot and cold
meal options that might include curries, casseroles, pasta dishes,
salads and jacket potatoes along with hot and cold dessert options.
Australian students can purchase items such as, sandwiches, pasta
salads, fruit and pizza from their school canteen.
Despite differences in approach, both governments are actively
attempting to direct school food decision makers to include, reduce
the presence of, or remove, certain foods and drinks from school
canteens. This directive is based on the notion that ‘healthy kids have
healthy canteens’ and the assumption that the introduction of school
food standards will enhance the nutritional quality of food available
to children in schools, and hence will contribute to an overall
improved diet and reduction in overweight and obesity. The latter
strategy of government which seeks to encourage students to regulate
their own behaviour, relates to the plethora of health education
initiatives and interventions in which pupils are taught the value of
healthy eating and learn how to select, prepare, and grow food that
will prevent them becoming overweight in the future. It is hoped that,
with appropriate guidance and support, students will become self
regulating subjects (Pike, 2008; Leahy, 2009; Vander Schee, 2009).
Much of this is predicated on the assumption that students simply
do not have the knowledge and skills to make the ‘correct’ choices in
terms of the food they consume without assistance from experts. Thus
schools have become key sites for the transmission of particular kinds
of knowledge about food and health and the production of particular
types of consuming subjects.
However, while schools have been the locus of attempts to ameliorate
specific public health concerns, recent interventions overtly seek
to recruit mothers into this endeavour through discourses of
engagement and partnership (Crozier, 1998; Popkewitz, 2002).
Not only do schools encourage future generations to become self
regulating citizens, but they also to extend their reach beyond the
school gates through increasingly porous boundaries to invite
mothers to contribute to this biopolitical strategy (Pike & Colquhoun,
2012). In so doing, mothers are recruited into a network of
governmental programs that converge around the issue of school food
which crucially work to constitute a particular kind of good subject.
We do not wish to imply a simplistic relationship between biopolitical
governance and mothers’ acceptance or rejection of school food
pedagogies. Rather we suggest a more complex picture comprised of a
multitude of different positions that may be adopted and in turn that
there are many ways in which mothers may be enticed into occupying
them. Our concern here though is to illustrate the ways in which
different fields of action are curtailed and opened up through this
pedagogicalisation of mothers.
School food pedagogies
It is without doubt that we have been witness to unprecedented policy
action in and around food in schools in both Australia and England.
As a result a proliferation of school based food pedagogies shape
students’ food related desires and practices (see Rich, 2011; Vander
Schee & Gard, 2011). And whilst traditionally students have been the
targets of school governmental interventions, mothers have recently
become the object and target of school food pedagogies. Lisette
Burrows (2009: 131) documents a range of school based and public
food related pedagogies directed towards ‘pedagogicalising parents’.
Her analyses reveal a plethora of web sites, television programs,
advice brochures, advertising and online games that prescribe
approaches to good parenting demonstrated through food selection,
preparation and consumption.
Whilst we acknowledge that these devices form part of the broader
governmental assemblage, in the ensuing discussion we focus our
analytical gaze on school lunches, and in particular the school
lunch box. School meals have attracted an enormous amount of
governmental attention, and we want to explore how the school
lunch box has become a site whereby students and their mothers are
enlisted into the governmental process via a multitude of pedagogical
techniques that prescribe certain practices of preparing lunch boxes,
and thus mothering and eating. The school lunchbox is significant
in the pedagogicalisation of mothers since it traverses both physical
and symbolic boundaries between home and school and represents
a performative enactment of the attitude of the mother towards
children’s wellbeing and education or rather ‘it is a sign of a woman’s
commitment as a mother and her inspiring her child to become
similarly committed as a student’ (Allison, 1997: 302). Thus, the
composition of and care invested in a child’s lunchbox articulates the
mother/child relationship, the nature of care given to the child and
mother’s acceptance of particular truths and knowledge related to
nutrition.
Pedagogies of the lunchbox
The ‘obesity epidemic’ has rendered children’s lunchboxes
governable, and consequently we have witnessed the necessary
emergence of a multitude of pedagogical strategies aimed at
regulating children’s lunchboxes. And although lunchboxes are
not governed by food standards in Australia or England, other
mechanisms come into play to ‘ensure’ that mothers place the
appropriate contents into lunchboxes.
For example in England, the School Food Trust produced a letter for
parents in March 2010 suggesting a three weekly menu designed to
improve the quality of packed lunches. Nevertheless, because of the
drive to increase take up of school lunches, parents were still guided
towards school meals as a preferred option. School lunches enable
children to try new foods which “may be a good way of ensuring that
your child has a healthy meal which may impact on their behaviour
and concentration in the classroom” (SFT, 2010). Good mothers who
care about their children’s education do not even attempt to provide
a packed lunch for them. Feeding children is better left to nutritional
experts.
In Australia guidelines and support materials have been developed
by various Departments of Health and of Education to assist parents’
decision-making about packing lunchboxes. In Healthy lunch box
ideas: save time, money and effort parents are told that ‘packing a
nutritious lunch box for your child to take to Family Day Care can
be easy. Whether your child is in full-time care, part-time care, out
of hours care or after school-care using the four simple steps below
will ensure your child is eating well and meeting the Family Day Care
Food and Nutrition Guidelines’ (Noarlunga Health Services, 2004: 1).
The four simple steps to packing lunchboxes are:
1. W
rite a list of all the meals and snacks your child will take to
Family Day Care. Include breakfast, snacks, lunch, dinner or
supper.
2. U
se the table below to work out which of the five food groups to
pack for different meals and snacks.
Meal or snack
Food group suggestions to pack
Breakfast
cereal product + dairy
Snack
1 dairy + fruit
Lunch
cereal product + dairy+ meat or alternative
+ vegetables
Snack 2
dairy + cereal product
Dinner
cereal product + dairy+ meat or alternative
+ vegetables
Supper dairy + fruit
3. U
sing the table, decide on the particular food you want to pack.
If your child is old enough, you may like to ask them to suggest
their own choices from the five food groups.
4. O
nce you have decided on the foods you will pack over a week,
you can add the items to your shopping list.
The brochure provides mothers with practical lunchbox ideas,
information about how much food a child needs and what to do about
treat foods (which should be excluded from lunchboxes because of the
risk of nutrient deficiencies and/or children’s overweight). Instead,
treat foods should be substituted with stickers, a crayon, a written
joke or a favourite toy. In moving beyond the remit of lunchboxes
into prescribing appropriate mothering practice, the brochure offers
advice about further possibilities for positive reinforcement, for
example an excursion or a visit to a park and suggests other ways
to provide comfort, aside from treats, including hugs and cuddles,
singing to the child or giving positive facial expressions.
The brochure is certainly not unique and governments and their
associated health agencies in Australia and the UK have produced
a plethora of material to provide information to parents about
providing healthy lunches for their children (see ‘Great lunch and
snack ideas for hungry kids’ – Queensland Government 2004; ‘Food
ideas for Home and School’ – Victorian Department of Education
and Early Childhood Education, ‘Change 4 Life’, NHS http://
www.nhs.uk/Livewell/childhealth6-15/Pages/Lighterlunchboxes.
aspx). However, what we wish to emphasise here is the binding of
lunchbox preparation to effective practices of motherhood and the
extension of school food pedagogies into this broader territory. In
addition mothers are interpellated in other ways via a range of mass
media. Usually at the time children are due to return to school,
women’s magazines and television lifestyle shows develop specialised
segments to educate mothers about what to pack in their child’s
lunchbox. These media frequently enlist a range of celebrity lifestyle
experts to guide the ‘ordinary’ consumer in choosing food that is
both nutritious and conforms to a particular aesthetic of culinary
taste (de Solier 2005, Lewis, 2008; Powell & Prassad, 2010). Thus,
the constellation of school lunch pedagogies that converge around
school lunches works to cultivate certain parenting practices, from
preparing healthy lunchboxes which conform to dominant cultural
understandings of taste, to providing treats and offering comfort.
Expert knowledges usurp those of mothers’ since the implicit message
is that food prepared by the state is unquestionably healthy because
it is approved by nutritionists. Lunchboxes provided from home
require intervention from experts to adhere to scientific principles
of child nutrition rather than relying on mothers’ knowledge of their
children’s individual tastes and preferences; and a range of tactical
strategies ensure that they do.
Stop and search: strategies of the lunchbox police
The governing of lunchboxes is an ongoing project. Once the lunch
box has been packed and sent off to school with the child, lunchboxes
(their owners and packers) are subjected to further governmental
mechanisms. Lunchbox surveillance is commonly employed as a
pedagogical device in both England and Australia and has similarly
been documented in other research (see Burrows & Wright, 2007;
Leahy, 2009; Rich, 2010). As a governmental strategy, teachers are
called on to evaluate lunchbox contents in light of dietary information
and to develop pedagogical responses to policing lunchboxes. In the
following excerpt we consider the policing of lunchboxes as explained
at a teacher professional development seminar. The seminar was part
of a broader suite of seminars assembled together by a professional
association aimed at building capacity of teachers to work in health
related areas in schools. The presenter discussed a range of strategies
that could be deployed by teachers as they attempted to fight the
war on obesity. One of the key strategies being advocated was
lunchbox surveillance. Teachers were instructed that at lunch time
they should check lunchboxes as students sat down to eat. Teachers
were encouraged to reinforce ‘good choices’ by highlighting them
when they are noticed. For example if a student had a banana in
their lunchbox, the teacher could (and should) transform this into a
pedagogical moment by praising the contents and deliver nutrient
knowledge about the particular item. There were other tactics
though too that teachers could draw on. For example if they walked
past a bad lunchbox they could either give that lunchbox the silent
treatment, or they could express a ‘tsk tsk’ to let it be known that the
student’s lunchbox was not acceptable.
In the English study, the policing of lunchboxes tended to be
conducted within the school dining room by the head teacher or by
lunchtime supervisors. Once again, children with undesirable items in
their lunchbox were made an example of:
Mrs. C (head teacher) gets up to leave the dining room. She
leaves through the door nearest to the pack up table. She stops
abruptly near the door and shouts loudly and slowly, “I don’t
want to see crisps in pack ups. They are not healthy! Don’t
bring them anymore!” Her voice is loud and booming and quite
intimidating. She stares at the children on the pack up table with
her hands on her hips. All goes quiet and she leaves the dining
room. She walks very slowly as if to emphasise the gravity of
the situation. It underscores her authority I feel. (Fieldnotes,
Cleveland School)
While teachers in the Australian study were encouraged to deploy
the silent treatment for lunchboxes deemed to be unhealthy, in the
English study, the head teachers’ disapproval was overt, unequivocal
and embodied. There can be no misinterpretation of the message
in this interaction. But for those students who persisted in bringing
unacceptable lunchboxes, further action was required, particularly
where lunchboxes contained chocolate, which was considered the
most offensive item for inclusion in a lunchbox. When chocolate was
discovered it was immediately confiscated by lunchtime staff, teachers
were notified and mothers were spoken to by teachers after school:
A I had to speak to the mum. I just said that they’re not allowed
chocolate.
Q Were you happy to do that?
A Yes, cos I agree with it. I don’t think he should be having
chocolate for his lunch. Cos children do tend to leave their
sandwiches or leave their apple, and then just eat the sweets
straightaway. (Teacher Rose Hill)
For teachers, speaking to mum was considered to be the final weapon
in their armoury against the unhealthy lunchbox. However, certain
types of mothers were regarded as repeat offenders and these were
generally felt to be those mothers that failed to adhere to expectations
around the nutritional content and aesthetic quality of food. The
assumption was that lunchboxes reflected parents’ diets and attitudes
to food. In areas of deprivation, this meant that parents’ diets,
food repertoire and nutritional knowledge were poor. The kinds
of foods alluded to in the example below are cheap, processed and
characteristically working class (Bourdieu, 1984; Lupton, 1996; de
Solier 2005; Powell & Prassad, 2010):
I don’t particularly think the parents’ diets, the majority of the
parents’ diet round here is particularly healthy..... generally the
parents tend to pack them up with their own packed lunch, and
you see the stuff that they’ve been packed up with and it’s just,
like, packets of biscuits and crisps and, and, erm, you know,
bars of chocolate and packets of sweets and fizzy drinks and it’s
everything you can imagine an unhealthy packed lunch to be.
(Teacher Crosby)
There are to be sure many variations of lunchbox surveillance as
described above. The mandate for conducting such strategies gains its
support from obesity risk discourses. We cannot know what the bodily
and emotional responses are for those children who are praised,
shamed or disciplined because of their lunchbox contents from these
data. On the very surface the intention is that praise will reinforce a
positive behaviour so that it continues. For those whose lunchboxes
were subjected to negative responses, for example the tsk tsk-ing
teachers, or having to sit and endure their teachers’ silence, the very
experience is explicitly designed to encourage the child to bring a
better lunch box. The message is clear, if they bring a ‘good’ lunch
box they can avoid having to bear the brunt of the bodily discomfort
of shame. In addition, the ‘good’ lunch box may actually become an
exemplar that they could then feel proud of.
Such strategies are designed not only to educate students about
healthy eating, but also to educate mothers in nutrition and the
aesthetics of food as the lunchbox functions as a two way conduit
across the porous boundary between home and school. The logic of
this approach proceeds along the lines that teaching children about
healthy eating or eliciting affective responses to teachers’ approval/
disapproval, will ‘educate’ mothers and motivate them to uphold
mothering practices that are configured around middleclass norms.
This intention is explicit in political discourse.
If we teach children about food, they will choose healthier food
and educate their parents as well. In disadvantaged areas with
Sure Start, mothers and fathers are learning much more about
food and food co-operatives are being set up. (Mary Creagh column 590 Hansard 28/10/05)
The mothers that are targeted by such approaches are those from
‘disadvantaged backgrounds’ living in ‘deprived communities’ for
example in ‘Sure Start’ areas, whose children are eligible for free
school meals, attend breakfast clubs or who have special needs. As
Stephanie Lawler (2005) suggests, these women are characterised by
their ‘lack’; they lack the appropriate level of cooking skills, they lack
taste in terms of their food preferences and they lack the right kind of
knowledge to be able to feed their children adequately. But as Lawler
and others have suggested, (Skeggs, 2005; Walkerdine & Lucey,
1989;) this ‘lack’ is intimately bound up with ideas of class and gender
and women who are deemed deficient are positioned as ‘other’ in
relation to normative assumptions of effective middle-class mothering
practices. Encouraging women to refashion themselves in response to
these normative assumptions becomes the explicit aim of school food
pedagogies and as such represents their overtly moral function (Dean,
2010). And because ultimately, these practices of self-formation are
couched in moral terms, where morality ‘is understood as the attempt
to make oneself accountable for one’s own actions, or as a practice in
which human beings take their own conduct to be subject to selfregulation’ (Dean, 2010: 19) attempts to resist school food pedagogies
are understood as excessive, unruly and immoral.
Resisting pedagogicalisation: contested subjects and the Battle of
Rawmars
While undoubtedly there are many examples of opposition to school
food reforms, the events that unfolded in England in September 2006
at a secondary school in Rotherham, South Yorkshire provoked an
unprecedented degree of media attention. For this reason, we turn
our attention towards an event which became known as ‘The Battle
of Rawmarsh’ as a critical incident in school food pedagogies where
different components in the pedagogical assemblage converged and a
variety of alignments between the media, health agencies and schools
were forged.
In response to high profile campaigns over the quality of school food,
the new academic year commenced at Rawmarsh Comprehensive
School with the implementation of a revised, healthier school
lunch menu. However, some students were unhappy about the
quality and selection of food and the time spent queuing in the
canteen. Consequently, two mothers purchased food from nearby
takeaways and shops and delivered it through the school railings to
their children at lunchtime. This enterprise proved more popular
with students than with the head teacher and as trade increased
relationships between the school and the women became increasingly
acrimonious. Since the school had no jurisdiction over the space
beyond the school railings and both the school and the women
refused to revaluate their actions, a standoff ensued that was played
out in the national and international media. With few exceptions, the
media characterised these women in relation to their poor taste, their
deficient intelligence and lack of moral integrity and their ineffective
mothering practices.1
Figure 1: The ‘Battle of Rawmarsh’, The Sun, September 2006
The physical appearance of the women in the cartoon bears no
resemblance to their actual appearance with later pictures in the
press revealing the women wearing jeans and t-shirts, with short tidy
hair, and a small amount of makeup and jewellery. Nevertheless, the
cartoon and some of the written articles invoke particular notions
1
In the UK series Jamie’s Ministry of Food (Channel 4), Julie Critchlow, one of the
“Burger-mum[s]” of Rawmarsh received more sympathetic treatment as celebrity
chef Jamie Oliver attempted to recruit her into supporting his cookery campaign.
According to the Channel 4 website “Jamie wants Julie, who is actually a good
cook herself, to help him to inspire others to cook at home” (http://www.channel4.
com/programmes/jamies-ministry-of-food/articles/about-jamies-ministry-offood). This programme specifically targeted the area of Rotherham as a site for
Jamie’s cookery school because of the ‘Battle of Rawmarsh’ incident. Furthermore,
Jamie Oliver acknowledged in this programme that his previous comments in the
press branding the women ‘scrubbers’ were a little unfair.
of working class femininity that provide legitimacy for school food
pedagogies. The portrayal of these mothers invokes an affective
response of disgust through the use of recognisable cultural signs
that mark these women out as working class, for example, the cheap
clothes which expose too much flesh, the ‘Croydon facelift’ pony
tails, the tattoos, the huge earrings and of course, the excessive, fat
and grotesque bodies. Thus they are presented as lacking in taste,
symbolised by their clothing, bodies and appearance (Lawler, 2005,
Tyler, 2008). Notions of taste are crucial to aspects of self-formation,
particularly in relation to food (Lupton, 1996) and in particular to
the constitution of white working class femininity (Lawler, 2002).
Thus, the cheap, processed, fatty, take away food that they distributed
displays their inability to make adequate healthy and aesthetic
judgements. They simply don’t know what good food is.
In relation to their morality, the amount of flesh on show in these
cartoons clearly identifies the characters as women with a particular
licentious attitude to sexual relations. In the popular press Jamie
Oliver branded these women ‘scrubbers’. By drawing on the symbolic
associations of fat, and the liberal exposure of it the women are
seen to embody excessive appetites. In addition, the women’s lack
of intelligence was illustrated in The Times which characterised the
entire town as “a place where fat stupid mothers fight for the right
to raise fat stupid children” (Hattersley, The Times 24th Sept 2006).
Here the women were deemed to be operating irrationally through
their non–compliance with the prevailing orthodoxy around healthy
eating, an orthodoxy in which school dinners are considered the only
means of providing a nutritious meal for children during the school
day. This discourse specifically positions the women as irresponsible
guardians of future generations with their ineffective mothering
practices bound to their embodied status as ‘fat’. But perhaps the
most savage attack came from the women’s own regional paper, The
Yorkshire Post:
If the rest of the world had ever wondered what goes on in deepest
South Yorkshire, then they now know, thanks to the ‘Rawmarsh
Junk Food Mothers’. Quite aside from the sheer stupidity (and
lack of respect) of shoving burger ‘n’ chips to schoolkids through
a fence by standing on graves, the good ladies of Rawmarsh have
demonstrated that the problems in our education system go back a
lot further than one generation.
I am trying not to be personally abusive, because I wouldn’t want
to come across any of them on a dark night, but, honestly, what an
embarrassing shower (Dowle, 22 September 2006, Yorkshire Post)
The article continues to stereotype the women further by labelling
them incoherent, poorly educated, alluding to their lack of
employment and even suggesting that they wore ‘saggy leggings’
thereby reinforcing their class position and lack of taste (Lawler,
2002; Lawler, 2005). Such caricatures serve to reinforce the
distinction between rational, educated, affective middle class
motherhood and the irrational, badly dressed, poorly educated,
unhealthy working class mothers who are notable because of
their deficiencies. By imbuing these women with such a range of
reprehensible attributes, the moral work that accompanies attempts
to govern is performed. Equating particular kinds of subjects with
opposition to school food reforms shapes the field of possible
responses that subjects can choose.
Discussion
Throughout this paper, we have attempted to highlight the ways
in which school food pedagogies seek to shape and influence the
food related desires and aspirations of children, young people and
their mothers Pedagogies attempt to cultivate and shape behaviour
by providing the technical means by which subjects can transform
their food practices by supplying information, skills, guidance and
incitement. In particular we have focused upon the school lunchbox,
its construction and the related practices of surveillance, punishment
and reward, as a governmental technology through which certain
types of mothers become targets of regulation. We have attempted to
locate these pedagogies within a broader governmental assemblage
of policy, political and media discourse and the plethora of different
agencies that are concerned with school food. School food and the
school lunchbox in particular can be regarded as sites where these
different elements converge. Through this convergence a complex
process of negotiation occurs where alliances are formed, resistance is
offered and battles are played out. However, the project of successful
government is to ensure that particular governmental imperatives
are met, that alignments are forged and resistance is negated in order
to enact or rather ‘translate’ governmental ambitions into practice
(Rose, 1999 and 2000).
We suggest that school food pedagogies are essential in achieving
the translation of governmental imperatives as pedagogies form ‘the
various complex of techniques, instruments, measures and programs
that endeavours to translate thought into practices and thus actualize
political reason’ (Inda, 2005: 9). In particular we suggest that school
lunchboxes can be regarded translation mechanisms that enable the
objectives of government to align with the subjects of government,
which in relation to the feeding of children, is generally mothers.
The governmental work that school food pedagogies perform is
explicitly moral in that it seeks to encourage subjects to work
upon themselves in ways that support particular views of health,
consumption and taste and which are tightly bound with concepts
of class, gender and what it is to be a ‘good mother’. When mothers
resist these particular rationalities of government their subjectivity is
called into question and found to be deficient. Our brief examination
of school lunch box pedagogies and the Battle of Rawmarsh
crystallizes the alignment of the school and the media to declare this
resistance irrational, immoral, disgusting and unhealthy.
School food pedagogies suggest that choices related to nutrition are
unlimited and unbounded, and that they are made rationally. This
sets up some mothers ‘as less capable, disciplined, intelligent and
civilised, even psychologically ill or underequipped to act in ways that
‘rational’ decent people’ know is good for one’s health’ (Evans et al,
2011: 399). If achieving health is as simple as acquiring knowledge
and having the appropriate skills, then this renders mothers who do
not comply with the school food agenda as defective citizens who have
failed not only in their own moral duty to be well (Greco, 2003), but
in their moral duty to secure the health of the next generation.
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About the authors
Jo Pike is a lecturer in Childhood Studies at the University of Leeds
where her research interests include children’s health and learning,
children’s geographies, learning environments, and children’s
health. Her published work explores the spatiality of school dining
rooms from a governmental perspective and her current research
focuses upon boys’ gun play in the early years.
Deana Leahy is a lecturer in the School of Education at Southern
Cross University, Australia. Presently her research interests are
framed by a concern about the political and moral work that is
‘done’ under the guise of improving the health of young people
in various settings. Drawing from post Foucauldian writings
on governmentality, Deana’s research develops the concept of
governmental assemblages to interrogate the mentalities enshrined
in policy and curriculum and in turn how they are put to work
within key pedagogical spaces. At present her work explores the
areas of drug education, sex education and nutrition education
within broader health promotion and education frameworks
Contact details
Dr. Jo Pike, School of Education, University of Leeds, Hillary Place,
Leeds, LS2 9JT UK.
Tel: +44 (0) 0113 3433210
Email: j.pike@leeds.ac.uk
Throw your napkin on the floor: Authenticity,
culinary tourism, and a pedagogy of the senses
University of Calgary
This article explores the educational objectives of a University
of Calgary short-term travel study program (Food Culture in
Spain 2011). A combination of secondary research and primary
data collected through in-depth interviews with former program
participants, as well as student reflective essays written in the
field, shows that the sensory experience with food is an important
pedagogical tool. Focusing on questions of intentionality, sensory
learning, and the meaning of authenticity, we explore the
complications inherent in a formal education program built around
culinary tourism. We argue that by the end of the three-week
program in Spain, students identify as informed culinary tourists
who recognize the complexity of authenticity and understand how
sensory experiences can inspire and motivate both a bodily and an
intellectual understanding of food and their relationship with it.
Lisa Stowe and Dawn Johnston 461
Introduction
May 13, 2011. It is Day 5, and our group is in Cordoba, two hours
south of Madrid, to visit an old alamazara, an olive oil press in the
countryside, and to experience the Arabic and Moorish influences
on the food culture of this region. We are staying in a small hotel
in the middle of the old town, across the street from the tourist
attraction that makes Cordoba famous, the Mezquita. It’s an early
rise this morning and even at this hour we find ourselves weaving
in and out of crowds of tourists. We pass souvenir shops filled with
t-shirts and cold drinks. Some students stop to peruse the wares
and plan for a return visit later that day, only to have us shepherd
them back into line, as the bus is waiting and we cannot be late.
We make our way across the bridge connecting the old town to
the newer section. The streets in the old town are too narrow for
our tour bus to manoeuvre, but this popular tourist town has
accounted for that, establishing a tour bus parking area across the
bridge where the many groups of tourists can meet their guides. As
we board our bus to the Nuñez de Prado olive oil press, we pass at
least five other buses, filled to capacity with tour groups of various
nationalities and ages. Within five minutes we pass an industrial
park, clear the city and are driving through the rolling hills and
orchards of Andalucia. Very few cars come this way and the roads
are narrow; at points it feels as if the bus won’t be able to make
the curve. Our group is chatting, watching the scenery from their
windows, and making plans for the day ahead. And then the smell
hits. At first most students aren’t sure what they are smelling -intense, fruity, only vaguely familiar. But then it dawns on them.
It’s olive oil. More specifically, it’s the smell of olives growing on
trees; something that most of them, born and bred in Canada, have
never smelled in the raw state. They are shocked. And curious.
Some ask, “Are olives a fruit or a vegetable?” A fruit. They grow on
trees. “So olive oil is a fruit oil?” Sort of. “Do people drink it?” Yes.
Wait until we get to the olive oil press. We’ll see. And smell. And
taste.
These students were the third group to visit the Nuñez de Prado
alamazara with us. Since 2007, we have been co-teaching the
University of Calgary’s “Food Culture in Spain” group study program.
462 Throw your napkin on the floor
This three-week travel study program, offered every second year,
engages undergraduate students in inquiry-based research, writing,
and group presentations on globalisation, culinary tourism, and the
popular practices of food production and consumption in Spain.
With a group of 27 students and a program assistant, we, the two
instructors, travel from western Canada to Spain, where we spend
three weeks exploring the country considered by some to be the
modern culinary capital of Europe.
The program is intellectually intense, and encourages students to
think and feel differently about food; as sustenance, as expression
of culture and regional identity, and as a mode of communication.
Foremost in our minds, as teachers, is the complexity that lies at
the heart of culinary tourism, which has emerged as an enticing and
profitable leisure activity throughout the world. Culinary tourism
offers the promise of an authentic engagement with another culture;
at the same time, as many culinary tourists have seen, it seems to
encourage host countries to “package” their food and culture into
desirable and palatable “experiences” for tourists. Spain has been
extraordinarily successful on this front, establishing itself within
popular media as a serious destination for “foodies.” It is the site of
many well-known experiments in eating: from artisan production,
to molecular gastronomy, to Michelin-starred restaurants in offthe-beaten-track locations. It also has entire neighbourhoods – even
towns and villages – whose principle raison d’etre seems to be an
aggressively marketed tourist experience. By organising a group study
program around the various (and sometime competing) practices of
food and eating in Spain, we endeavour to explore the diversity of
Spain’s food culture, always questioning, but just as often, embracing,
the pleasures and challenges of our experience.
Our program, while quite clearly representative of a constructed,
formal learning experience, also makes space for and encourages
informal and incidental learning, particularly as inspired by sensory
experience. It is not our goal to romanticise informal or sensory
learning; rather, we wish to acknowledge that many students feel
discouraged, after years of formal education, from paying attention
to their sensory experiences. This romanticisation is difficult to
avoid; as Swan (2012: 59) suggests, “Experience, particularly in its
emotional and bodily representations is sometimes is sometimes
presumed to be un-mediated and un-ideological as emotions and
bodies are often thought to be more real, more natural and more
true than rationality or cognition.” Through assignments, lectures,
and discussions, we encourage students to value sensory learning
without disproportionately privileging it over cognitive learning; after
all, food and eating are integrally connected to the senses. We hope
that that on its best days, our program makes a space for students to
incorporate sensory learning into their more formal academic work
without creating a binary between ‘the lived’ and ‘the studied’ or the
sensory and the cognitive.
In this paper we utilise a combination of secondary research and
primary data collected through written assignments and in-depth,
post-program interviews with participants from the 2011 “Food
Culture in Spain” program. Through analysis of this data, we aim to
highlight how a sensory experience with food can be an important
pedagogical strategy that often connects formal and informal
learning. Specifically, we wish to explore the following questions:
How can the ‘intentionality’ of culinary tourism be mobilised to foster
empowered, critical, reflective learning? In what ways does the desire
for an “authentic” food experience motivate learning? Finally, to what
extent can sensory experience contribute to a student’s understanding
of authenticity?
Culinary tourism and authenticity: Defining the terms and reviewing
the literature
The first step in understanding the pedagogical significance of a
short-term travel study program dedicated to the study of food is a
definition of culinary tourism; after all, the role of the tourist is the
most prominent role many of the students play while in the field.
Culinary tourism and the experience of understanding another
culture through food constitute a significant field of inquiry in food
studies. Culinary tourism is different from other forms of travelling
in that there is a pre-determined motivation for seeking out food
experiences. Lucy Long (2004: 21) defines culinary tourism as “the
intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an other”
and she emphasises the “individual as an active agent in constructing
meanings within a tourist experience.” For Long, culinary tourism
cannot be accidental. Intentionality is crucial. In an educational
tourism context, it is the intentionality or ‘eating with a pedagogical
purpose’ that can push the tourist from eating as a form of sustenance
to eating with a critical eye.
It is important to acknowledge here that the culinary tourist
experience cultivated as part of a university degree program of study
is distinct from the culinary tourist experience designed for leisure
tourists. While there is much overlap between the two groups, we
have seen, firsthand, the differences between touring with the primary
motivation of pleasure, combined, perhaps, with informal learning,
and touring with the joint motivation of pleasure and formal learning
in an academic discipline. The motivation for our development of
this group study program was a culinary tour we took in 2004 with
a group of chefs and culinary students. On that tour, as culinary
tourists, we were driven by a desire to see what others don’t see, do
what others don’t do, and eat what others don’t eat – classic “food
adventuring,” in Lisa Heldke’s terms (2007). We were aware of the
‘risks’ of culinary tourism – of slipping into patterns of colonialism
and cultural appropriation that can often accompany a desire, to
borrow the words of bell hooks (2000), to “eat the other”.
Three years later, when leading our own program in our dual
role as guides and teachers, we were driven by similar desires,
but those desires were coupled with a deliberate and intentional
pedagogical goal. We wanted our students to engage in Long’s
“intentional exploration” of food and culture, and we coupled that
with a requirement for equally intentional scholarly reflection on
their experiences. In addition to more traditional assignments
such as research papers and seminar presentations, we crafted
reflection questions and a reflective final exam based on both the
formal components of our program and the informal experiences
that students had on their own and in groups. The questions asked
students to frame their food and travel experiences in light of their
own backgrounds, their upbringing, and the socio-cultural values that
have shaped their learning. We hoped that through this intentional
exploration, our students could reflect on the hegemonic traditions of
culinary tourism while simultaneously embracing the opportunities
provided by culinary tourism – to experience, to share, and to interact
in thoughtful and meaningful ways.
Jenny Molz (2007: 78) furthers Long’s definition of culinary tourism,
explaining that, “food acts as a transportable symbol of place and
of cultural identity,” or a tangible reminder, for the tourist, of a
geographic location and experience of culture. Both Long and Molz
emphasise that it is not so much the food itself that is an object of
cultural experience but rather it is the subject’s experience with
the food that takes it to a higher level of significant meaning. Food
itself does not change depending upon context; a Valencia orange
is a Valencia orange, whether it is pulled off a supermarket produce
display in Canada or picked directly from a tree in Spain.
For Long and Molz, the meaning or “symbol” of place, culture,
and identity lies in the person experiencing the food, who is quite
likely to have a different experience eating the same orange in two
very different contexts. Long’s “active agent,” then, is the key to
understanding the effect of culinary tourism, specifically on students
who are eating and drinking, not solely for pleasure, but within the
formal curriculum requirements of an academic program. Both Long
and Molz are relying upon John Urry’s notion of the tourist gaze as
fundamental to the way culinary tourists intentionally seek out food
experiences. Urry (Urry and Larsson, 2011:1-2) suggests, as he did
for the first time in 1990, that “the concept of the gaze highlights
that looking is a learned ability and the pure and innocent eye is a
myth.” That “learned ability” is “conditioned by personal experiences
and memories framed by rules and styles.” Like Long and Molz,
Urry sees the subject, or in our case, the student, as the meaning
maker, particularly when it comes to making sense of the ways in
which their travel experience is framed by their socially constructed
understandings of race, class, gender, and other components of
identity and community. Our students, as largely white, largely
middle-class Canadians, easily fall into the trap of painting the
Other with broad strokes; they speak, in advance of our travels, of
‘Spanish food,’ ‘Spanish people,’ and ‘Spanish culture’ as though the
differences between Canada and Spain will be far more profound than
any differences within Spain -- and as though they, as Canadians,
will have a unified cultural experience. We try to complicate these
presumptions by asking students to identify and be cognisant of the
ways in which their own backgrounds influence their interaction with
the Other, as well as the ways in which they see evidence of Othering
in the country they are visiting.
The further students get into analysing and unpacking their
relationship to food and their role as a tourist, the more determined
they become to avoid what they see as the trappings of heavily
constructed tourist experiences. They become fixed on the pursuit
of what they define as an authentic food experience. Authenticity is
a complicated term – not just for undergraduate students studying
food in Spain, but also for those theorists who attempt to define the
term for tourism studies. John Taylor (2001: 8) suggests that for a
long time, authenticity posed as “objectivism” and that “It [held] the
special powers both of distance and of ‘truth’.” This characterisation
of authenticity suggests that the tourist might observe a cultural event
and then be filled with some knowledge about a particular culture.
With this definition there is very little active engagement between
tourist and event, a problem perhaps best described by MacCannell
(1973), who suggests that tourists’ quests for authentic experiences
are frustrating, if not futile. MacCannell utilises Erving Goffman’s
model of “front stage” and “back stage,” where the front of house
is the staged tourist ‘show’ and the back of house is the more ‘real’
local space. However, MacCannell is doubtful that tourists can find
authenticity in either, as the back spaces are often just as staged as
the front spaces – something that culinary tourists certainly find as
they discover that their special ‘all-access’ visits to award-winning
restaurant kitchens are just as heavily constructed as their experience
as guests in the dining room. For MacCannell, there is an illusion of
authenticity that will inevitably frustrate tourists if they continue to
define a successful tourist experience as one in which they get ‘behind
the scenes.’
Ning Wang (1999: 364) is perhaps more optimistic than MacCannell,
in his analysis of what constitutes an authentic tourist experience,
suggesting that “tourists are not merely searching for authenticity
of the Other. They also search for the authenticity of, and between,
themselves.” Wang (1999: 359) calls for tourists to have a conscious
sense of self that makes the tourists aware of their own subjectivity
within the world:
Thus, existential authenticity, unlike [an] object-related version,
can often have nothing to do with the issue of whether toured
objects are real. In search of [a] tourist experience which is
existentially authentic, tourists are preoccupied with an existential
state of Being activated by certain tourist activities.
For Wang, existential authenticity, or the authenticity of “being,”
relies on a balance between reason and emotion, and depends on
activation by experience -- this is precisely where the daily reflective
writing assignments become useful. We are encouraging students to
physically and emotionally immerse themselves in experiences, but
also to step back and make sense of those experiences by thinking
about their own place within them; to reflect upon the ways in which
their personal and cultural histories, their values, their beliefs,
and their expectations influence their interpretation of any given
activity. Our reflective prompts move the focus away from identifying
authenticity in the object and toward identifying authenticity in the
student’s interaction with the object. Wang’s notion of existential
authenticity is rooted in the conscious relationship between object
and subject, making space for students to be part of the construction
of an authentic experience, rather than luckily stumbling upon one in
a hole-in-the-wall restaurant outside of the touristy areas of a small
Spanish town. When students interrogate the relationship between
their expectations and their experiences, they begin to understand
that their intentional subjective engagement is a better marker of
authenticity than any of the objective qualities of the activity in which
they participate.
Positioning students as agents in the making of an existentially
authentic experience leads directly into our primary goal in our Food
Culture travel study program – the entwining of formal, informal,
cognitive, and sensory learning. Here, the work of Allison HayesConroy and Jessica Hayes-Conroy (2008) on the role of visceral
experience in learning is particularly useful. As the Hayes-Conroys
(2008: 465) point out, “…memory, perception, cognitive thinking,
historical experience, and other material relations and immaterial
forces all intersect with individuals’ sensory grasp of the world.”
For students who have often seen their learning experiences in
binary terms (formal/informal, individual/group, mind/body), the
intentional enmeshing of these concepts, through our teaching and
through their reflective essays, is an important step in achieving the
learning goals set out in this program.
The intentionality of culinary tourism
As program coordinators, curriculum designers, and teachers,
we were explicit in our desire and intent to position students as
the meaning makers, and to have them approach their travel with
intentionality – to be deliberate in acknowledging and challenging
their frames of reference, their assumptions, and their observations.
In our trip to the olive oil press, students began to see themselves
as active constructors of their own experience, rather than people
who simply step into pre-existing situations. Instead of walking into
a ready-made tourist scenario where information was fed to them
unprompted, they were responsible for directing discussion, asking
questions, and thinking ahead to the ways in which they might write
about the experience. In both reflective writing and interviews, many
of the students referred specifically to their intentional adoption of
the student-tourist role, suggesting that they wanted to experience
events with a depth of awareness that they associated as being distinct
from what they understand to be the typical tourist gaze. Students
spoke of seeing the student-tourist role as less passive or superficial
than the typical tourist role, at least for themselves. Most of them
acknowledged that this travel experience was distinctly different than
past situations in which they had considered themselves to be leisure
tourists. Lauren, a third year Music student, describes her efforts in a
post program interview:
[We were] not just accepting things exactly as you see them, but
looking deeper into it. And I am specifically thinking of the olive
oil press where we didn’t just say “OK, that’s how he does it.”
There were so many questions that people asked… “Oh, why do
you do this?” and “How long have you done that for?” and you are
just interested in so many other aspects of it and always trying to
search for something deeper.
That deliberateness in gaining as much depth of knowledge as
possible about the processes and practices of this family-run olive
oil press – much like MacCannell’s notion of getting “backstage”
– was indicative of the attitude of most of the students. We urged
students to take advantage of their location, their surroundings, and
the opportunity to ask questions of everyone they met. Several of the
students talked, months after the program had ended, about how
powerfully their own questions and reflections of the field trip played
in their memory of the experience.
For Alyssa, a third year Communication Studies student, this
experience is a turning point as the students’ inquiry-based learning
became the subject of their social discussions:
The field trip that I always remember is going to the olive oil
press...we were looking out the window and everyone was like,
‘Where are we? This is totally different than anything we have seen
before’ so it already started off as a new experience and we were
all ready to engage with something different than we had before...
on the bus ride back we were all talking about that experience the
whole time. We didn’t start talking about our lives or all that kind
of stuff. We really wanted to continue talking about the olive oil
press and the different things we learned there and how we were
so excited for everyone to try this olive oil.
As teachers, we were entirely aware, on that same bus ride, that this
was the first time that we’d heard the students talking about their
learning at a time when they weren’t ‘required’ to. It was a moment
at which the students’ own determination to engage, head-on, with
the course content, became obvious. Lauren, in her post-program
interview, mentions the field trip to a family-run winery in the Rioja
region as another instance in which she wanted to be ‘more than’
a tourist. In her mind –consciously reflecting on experiences was
somehow different than simply racking up experiences for the sake of
saying she had done or seen something. She described the realisation
that even as she was participating in an activity that she primarily
associates with leisure, she kept thinking “Oh, what would I write
about this” or “how would I think about this if I was going to write a
reflective paper?” This deliberate reflection became commonplace as
the program went on. When students wrote about taste and smell,
they began to use more complex language. Instead of describing
the taste of a meal as “good” or “bad” or “different,” they began to
make connections to memory, place, and time. Their reflections
demonstrated an intersection of the sensory and the cognitive with
increasing complexity throughout the program.
Just as frequently throughout the program, students demonstrated
intentionality in the way they spoke of their plans for back home,
thinking aloud of ways they might approach their daily life with the
intentionality of a culinary tourist. One of the most popular topics
of conversation in travel study programs is the comparison to daily
life in Canada. But rather than simply noting difference or engaging
in simplistic better/worse comparisons, students expressed an
explicit desire to take components of their daily lived experience
in Spain and find a way to insert these components into their lives
at home. In a reflective essay, Lauren speaks of the trip to the olive
oil press giving her “a personal connection with the olive oil” and
making her “consciously aware of all other products as well.” Dena,
a third year Communications Studies student, sees her experiences
in Spain providing her with “a more fully rounded perspective
on how I might attempt to re-create the fullest pleasure of eating
when I return home.” Perhaps most insightfully, Amy, a fourth year
Communications Studies student, writes of her newfound awareness
of the relationship she can have with food:
I have learned that I can’t be passive [about food]. If I want
good food or healthy food, then I have to take the steps to earn
the knowledge. Then I can make informed decisions about what
I’m eating, where it’s coming from, and is it good for me. Once
I have the knowledge, then I have the power, and every time I
use it, it is to my advantage. Not only do I have a more “accurate
consciousness” (Berry, 1992, p. 234), but I will get more pleasure
from eating because I know that I am taking the steps to be an
informed eater.
Perhaps contrary to their previous travel experiences in which they
cordoned off travel time as pleasure-oriented ‘special occasion’ time,
these students were treating their travels as the inspiration for new
ways to eat, shop, cook, and engage with their daily lives at home in
ways that they hadn’t done in their previous travel experiences.
Quest for authenticity: The impossible dream
For the student-tourist – much as for many culinary tourists – there
is a pervasive desire to distinguish their travel experience from that of
others by seeking out ‘authentic’ local food. Authenticity, along with
being a major theme in our academic inquiry, has become something
of a running joke in our travel study program. Months prior to leaving
for Spain, students start talking about experiencing ‘the authentic
food culture of Spain,’ and they are convinced that they will avoid
the tourist ‘traps’ and find that little ‘hole in the wall’ cafe where the
‘real’ Spanish food is served. They all have different ideas about what
is real Spanish food -- paella, rabo de toro, tapas -- but finding it is
their mission. By midway through the program, their ideas around
authenticity have shifted completely. Restaurants outside tourist
areas are not instantly, inherently more “authentic” than those in
major tourist centres, and some of the best food they eat isn’t Spanish
at all. They are convinced there is no such thing as authenticity, and
like MacCannell suggests, they discover that a search for the authentic
food culture of any society is a search fraught with tension and
frustration.
Inevitably, by the second week of our three-week program, we have to
stage an intervention with our students who have become frustrated
and discouraged in their search for authenticity. We ask students to
consider Wang’s idea of the existential tourist who can participate
in cultivating an authentic experience. We provide prompts that ask
students to examine how their responses to an experience might be,
as Wang suggests, both rational and emotional, and how delicate that
balance can be. We ask them to step back from their experiences,
and to critically analyse the socio-cultural influences that inform and
shape their initial reactions. From a pedagogical perspective, this is
an immeasurably valuable approach to discussing, positioning, and
understanding authenticity as it relates to food pedagogy. Students
who are actively engaged in finding an authentic food experience
while simultaneously being aware of the futility of such a search are
students who are critically evaluating their relationship to food by
engaging, daily, with food and eating as objects of inquiry rather than
simply as products or activities necessary to daily life.
Within days of arriving in Spain, students realise how difficult it is to
find anything resembling their pre-conceived notions of ‘authentic’
Spanish food. Their first trip to Madrid’s Plaza Mayor bombards
them with placards advertising a popular processed ‘OK Paella’ being
served in most of the plaza’s restaurants. In the streets surrounding
our hotel in Cordoba, restaurants and cafes all post a ‘tourist
menu’ next to their menu del dia, usually consisting of a highly
Americanised version of a Spanish main dish, accompanied by French
fries and a pre-made dessert. Students feel cheated by this food,
and by the assumption that tourists will want a different meal than
that which offered to Spaniards. As a consequence, students become
increasingly frustrated in their efforts to avoid the tourist label. In
a post-program interview, Amy explains the frustration of the early
days in the program:
The word [authentic] came up so much and it was such a struggle
for everybody to wrap their head around and all of the different
words that went with it, and we were constantly looking into
restaurants…. ‘well that place can’t be authentic, look how many
tourists are there, we cannot go there.’ And then we would go
to the next place, ‘well this place has nobody in it, it must be
authentic’ ...I tried so hard when we were there not to be the
typical tourist…
Another fourth year Communications Studies student, Lacey, says
that authenticity became “an enemy of a word,” suggesting that
at times, the obsession that she and her friends had with finding
authentic meals and experiences “overshadowed our ability to
experience pleasure.” Erica, a third year Communications Studies
student, articulated the frustration best in a reflective essay, saying
that “Authenticity is an intangible concept of idealism that we grasp
at. It is almost like the more we try to make our experience something
authentic, the more it becomes contaminated by well intended, but
counteractive efforts.”
Our goal was to have students complicate their earliest uses of
the word “authentic” and to question what it means to engage,
authentically, with a meal, or an experience, or, indeed, with a
culture. The purpose of the exercise was not to destroy all pleasure or
joy for the students -- on the contrary, it was to help them understand
that authenticity was not an objective concept -- that it didn’t live
in a particular food, or a particular restaurant, but rather, in their
emotional, sensory, and thoughtful engagement with an experience.
We ask them to try and explain how eating paella in the middle of
Plaza Mayor surrounded by other tourists might still be an authentic
experience; how authenticity might, as Wang suggests, be located “of
and between themselves” rather than in the paella or the plaza. And,
so, in the second week of the program, we start talking in more depth
about the role that they play in having an authentic experience.
For many students, the olive oil press proved to be an experience that
they could eventually embrace as existentially authentic. In this field
trip, the students were, for three hours, immersed in the world of a
multi-generation family run business, organic long before organic
was a buzzword, where catering to tourists was a very low priority.
Having come directly from Cordoba, where we were surrounded by
souvenir shops and tourist menus and endless accommodations for
throngs of tourists, we now found ourselves in an environment with
no promotional materials, no tourist information centre and not even
a shop in which to properly display and sell their olive oil. For many
of the students, the sudden departure from having everything handed
to them made them more interested and engaged in the experience.
Amy gave a great deal of thought to the subject, and came up with the
following final exam reflection:
Food can be an incredible insight, but one can’t simply eat Spanish
food and believe that they better understand the Spanish way
of life. For me, our visit to the olive oil press was an authentic
experience, and I learned from this trip that this type of authentic
experience is particularly important. Actually learning about the
history of olive oil, seeing with my own eyes the machine used to
make it and hearing the passion and pride in [the owner’s] voice
has changed the way I look at olive oil forever. I will never be able
to go to Safeway and buy the cheapest brand without thinking
about how it was made, where it is from, etc. I would never have
got such an experience if I had just used olive oil in a restaurant. I
know that when I make the decision to research where the olive oil
I’m buying is from, when I choose to spend the extra money on a
quality product, that I will get more pleasure from what I’m eating
because I’ll be thinking about how I am supporting a traditional
family business like Paco’s. That is what I believe an authentic
experience is, and why I know it is important.
In the same way that the absence of tourists doesn’t inherently render
a place or event authentic, the presence of tourists, such as in our
visit to the olive oil press, doesn’t immediately render an experience
inauthentic. When students had the opportunity to touch the olives,
see the press, taste the oil, and talk to its producer, they connected
with this food experience both cognitively and viscerally, and began
to understand the value of learning through both their minds and
their senses. This experience is not unmediated; it does not exist,
independent of those who visit, as some sort of quintessential,
pure, authentic marker of Spanish life and culture. But for many
of our students, this was one of the first moments in which they
saw and articulated relationships between their past beliefs and
behaviours, their current experience, and their intentions to think
and act differently in the future. It would be easy to dismiss this
particular field trip as an uncomplicated experience that requires
little intellectual interrogation on the part of our students -- this is,
after all, precisely the kind of experience that most culinary tourists
desperately seek when visiting Spain. But we would argue that the
intentional, thoughtful reflection of these students, as they question
how and why they understand this experience to be authentic, is
precisely what makes the experience existentially authentic. As
Theo van Leeuwen (2001: 396) so usefully suggests in his essay on
authenticity in discourse, it is our job “to ask, not: ‘How authentic
is this?’, but ‘Who takes this as authentic and who does not?’.” In
our understanding of what authenticity means, no experience, no
matter how accessible or how obscure, is inherently authentic. It is
the practice or interrogation of the experience in which authenticity
resides.
Pedagogy of the senses
It became increasingly clear to us, throughout the duration of our
program, that students responded most profoundly and thoughtfully
to the experiences in which their senses were really engaged. The first
time they tasted a fresh anchovy. The first bite of the salty, paper-thin
jamon that Spain is famous for. The mild fruitiness of the olive oil that
was poured liberally on most of their meals. The cacophony of voices
in a plaza bar, where patrons ranged from newborn to elderly, and
no one seemed to seek out a ‘quiet table.’ The very notion of walking
into a crowded bar, eating one perfect bite of food, and throwing their
napkins on the floor before moving onto the next stop. We heard
about these experiences from students again and again, and it became
abundantly clear that this physical, sensual engagement with the food
of Spain was coming to define our students’ experience.
A travel study program has very little value if it does no more than
replicate the practices and purposes of a regular home classroom in
the midst of another country. So while we were demanding in our
expectations that students read, write, and present as part of the
program, it was also crucial to us that they do, see, and feel. The
critical and analytical lens of culinary tourism, after all, is not the
only way students learn through food. In order to appreciate the
pedagogical value of such food-centred study abroad programs we
need to understand how the senses play a role in student learning.
Lucy Long (2004:21) highlights the importance of sensory experience
in understanding culinary tourism when she encourages “an aesthetic
response to food as part of that experience.” Other theorists see
sensory reactions, specifically taste, as critical to food studies and to
a long term memory of experiences of both food and travel. Heldke
(2007: 386) suggests that:
Though it would be hyperbolic and unverifiable to assert that
gustatory encounters with the unfamiliar are the most profound
perceptual experiences the traveller can have, anecdotal
evidence suggests the terrors and delights of the tongue affect so
dramatically that their memories remain sharp even years later.
Some might argue that taste and smell are highly subjective and that
what is unfamiliar for one person might not be for another. Indeed,
many of our students spoke of eating things that were familiar to
other people but terrifying for them, like raw meat or a barely-cooked
egg. But as Carol Korsmeyer (2007: 8) suggests, senses such as taste
can create and activate memories that connect the individual to the
historical, the social, and the cultural:
Tastes are subjective but measurable, relative to culture and to
individual, yet shared; fleeting sensations that nonetheless endure
over many years in memory; transient experiences freighted with
the weight of history. And finally tastes can provide entertainment
and intellectual absorption, both when they are experienced in the
act of eating and drinking…
As our students spent more and more time immersing themselves
in the food culture of the various regions of Spain, they became
increasingly liberated in the language they used to describe
experiences, challenging their comfort zones in academic writing.
Instead of relying exclusively on carefully considered and deliberate
references to academic articles, students started to also speak
and write of the sensual pleasures of their experiences, and the
simultaneous fear and delight that can come with sensory excitement.
A student who had been quite conservative in her writing in the
early days of the program spoke, later, of a dinner we had shared,
remembering “the fresh, cold saltiness of the tuna tartare” and “the
tangy sweetness of the raspberry sorbet.” Another told the story of
being in a pintxos bar in San Sebastian, where a particularly elaborate
array of food was displayed on the counter, only to catch a glimpse,
out of the corner of her eye, of another student’s purse-sized bottle
of hand sanitizer perched amidst the gorgeous display of food -- for
her, this was a perfect visual juxtaposition of the culture shock that
some students had experienced in Spain. In a striking echo of the
Hayes-Conroys’ reference to intersection between the visceral and the
cognitive, Lacey recalls the sensory experiences at the olive oil press
to explain what she called a difference between “head sense” and
“heart sense”:
When I reflect on that day, very little of what I recall is ‘head.’ All
I remember is the oranges and the olive oil. The handshake that
I got from [the owner]...the graciousness that we felt from him.
That’s not really a head sense but it is a heart sense. The smell
of walking in the room where they did the press. The feel of the
rope circles that they squished olives in between. Still to this day a
whole year later that kind of nylon-y rope, anything that looks or
feels like that reminds me of that day…
She goes on to talk about how up until then, authenticity had felt like
a joke, but that at this point, everyone “just got it”. For her, it was the
sensory experience that made things ‘real’ and allowed her to move
from feeling like a self-conscious tourist into feeling a connection to
the food culture of Spain.
Many students spoke of their sensory experience with food in Spain
being a turning point in seeing the value of eating for pure pleasure
instead of simply nourishment or habit. Upon her first visit to a
popular and crowded tapas bar in a small town in the Rioja region,
Maia, a third year Communications Studies student, writes:
...anticipation met its mark in my first visit to Asador Sagartoki.
All of the passion and pleasure was immediately evident in the
restaurant, redefining my notion of culture entirely. The seemingly
careless ease with which the servers produced food, slinging
bites from counter to plate while jet streams of cider shot from
the walls behind them brought to light Bourdain’s notion of
“terrorizing” one bar after another...I can identify with the notion
of being terrified; my experiences eating in Vitoria and in San
Sebastian comprise the most uncomfortable and yet amazing
eating of my life. The tapas culture requires that you work for
your food, but rewards you with unending tidbits of delicious (yet
unexpected) combinations. This feeling of having my comfort zone
challenged was essential to shifting my perspective on consumer
consciousness and the pleasures of eating. Being so involved in the
process, fighting to get up to the bar, shouting to order, without
knowing what you are getting, even keeping track of your own bill,
puts an onus and responsibility on the diner that sharpened my
perspective and made me appreciate my food, and the pleasure of
eating, all the more.
Her description of the physical experience of the bar -- slinging food,
shooting cider, fighting to get to the bar, shouting to order -- these
sensory experiences were entirely unfamiliar to most of our Canadian
students, for whom busy, crowded bars were usually for drinking and
dancing, not eating, and restaurants tended to be a decidedly more
sedate environment. The sensory overload created by the tapas bars
of Northern Spain challenged our students’ understanding of food
culture in a way that made them feel – however temporarily – like
part of Spanish life.
Conclusion
The experience of studying the food culture of another country (much
like the experience of traveling abroad with a group of university
students) is fraught with complexity. As instructors, we endeavour to
help our students see the importance of a pedagogy of the senses –
one that values and complicates their sensory experiences. We know
that in doing so, we run the risk of romanticising sensory education
as somehow more “natural” or “pure” than cognitive learning (Swan
2012; Hayes-Conroy 2008). This is not our goal. To be sure, we are
driven by a desire to see our students stop dismissing their senses a
something separate from cognition – to think about how taste and
sound and smell, for instance, can inspire and motivate both a bodily
and an intellectual understanding of food and their relationship with
it. We would never suggest that sensory learning is any less racialised,
or classed, or gendered than cognitive learning; indeed, we talk about
precisely these issues regarding the social construction of sensory
experience on a daily basis throughout the program. While many of
our students, in their early reflective writing, are producing “middleclass epiphanies”2 framed by Western narratives of food, travel,
and authenticity, they are also providing entry into a more complex
interrogation of what – and how – they know.
Throughout their travels and studies, our students struggle, much
as we do in this article, to make sense of authenticity. There is a
great temptation -- among tourists, among students, and Thanks to
Elaine Swan for this phrase.indeed, among academics, to settle on
a tidy definition of authenticity that can provide satisfaction to the
traveller in search of authentic experiences. But such a tidy definition
is virtually impossible, and, in our minds, ultimately dissatisfying,
erasing the nuances that make authenticity interesting. As Wang
(1999: 353) so usefully suggests, it is crucial to recognise that
“authenticity is not a matter of black or white, but rather involves a
much wider spectrum, rich in ambiguous colors. That which is judged
as inauthentic or staged authenticity by experts, intellectuals, or elite
may be experienced as authentic and real from an emic perspective-2 Thanks to Elaine Swan for this phrase.
this may be the very way that mass tourists experience authenticity.”
This notion of a spectrum of authenticity is exceptionally valuable for
us as teachers -- it provides us with an entryway to problematise the
more “obviously” or stereotypically authentic experience of the olive
oil press, as well as to invite reflection on how eating a Big Mac in
the midst of the walled city of Toledo might be an equally authentic
experience.
We would argue that food is a powerful, but not uncomplicated,
pedagogical tool in the process of student learning, where both the
mind and the body are simultaneously engaged in understanding
crucial components of communication and culture. As culinary
tourists, students are critically engaged with the food culture of
Spain, but as sensory beings they are also individually challenged as
they experience food and eating with a deliberate awareness of both
sensory and cognitive experiences. Our students became aware of
their own power to create meaning in experiences, recognising that
critical analysis and intentional reflection can be applied to even the
most quotidian moments of their travels -- the sensory experiences
that they have often taken for granted. Finally, with time and
seemingly endless discussion, they come to understand authenticity
as a process of engagement between subject and object -- as a means,
rather than an end.
References
Berry, W. (1992). ‘The pleasures of eating’, in Curtin, D. & Heldke, L. (eds.),
Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food,
Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 374-379.
Hayes-Conroy, A., & Hayes-Conroy, J. (2008). ‘Taking Back Taste: Feminism,
Food and Visceral Politics’, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of
Feminist Geography, 15(5), 461-473.
Heldke, L. (2007). ‘But is it Authentic? Culinary Travel and the Search for
the ‘Genuine Article’’ in Korsmeyer, C (ed.), The Taste Culture Reader:
Experiencing Food and Drink, New York, New York: Berg, 385-394.
Hooks, b. (2000) ‘Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance’ in Schor, J.B and
D.B. Holt (eds.), The Consumer Society Reader, New York, New York:
The New Press, 342-359.
Korsmeyer, C. (2007). The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and
Drink, New York, New York: Berg.
Long, L. (2004). ‘Culinary Tourism: A Folkloric Perspective on Eating and
Otherness’, in Long, L. (ed.), Culinary Tourism, Lexington: Kentucky:
University of Kentucky Press, 20-50.
MacCannell, D. (1973). ‘Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in
Tourist Settings’, American Journal of Sociology, 79(3), 589-603.
Molz, J. (2007). ‘Eating Difference: The Cosmopolitan Mobilities of Culinary
Tourism’, Space and Culture, 10 (1), February, 77-93.
Swan, E. (2012). ‘Blue Eyed Girl? Jane Elliott’s Experiential Learning
and Anti-Racism’ in M. Reynolds and R. Vince (eds), Handbook of
Experiential Learning and Management Education, Oxford University
Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 202-220
Taylor, J. (2001). ‘Authenticity and sincerity in tourism’, Annals of Tourism
Research, 28, 7–26.
Urry, J. and J. Larsen (2011, third edition) The Tourist Gaze, London: Sage
Publications.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2001). ‘What is Authenticity?’, Discourse Studies, 3, 392397.
Wang, N. (1999). ‘Rethinking authenticity in the tourist experience’, Annals
of Tourism Research, 26, April, 349–370.
About the authors
Lisa Stowe is a full time faculty member in the Department
of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary.
Her research areas include food studies, experiential learning,
informal and formal learning situations in higher education
and transformative education. Currently, she is researching and
writing a qualitative case study that profiles and substantiates how
undergraduate students learn while enrolled in a short-term travel
study program.
Dawn Johnston holds a PhD in Communication and Culture
from the University of Calgary, where she is now a full-time faculty
member. Her research and teaching interests include television
and film studies, gender and sexuality in popular culture, and food
culture. She co-developed and has been co-teaching the University of
Calgary’s Food Culture in Spain travel study program since 2007.
Contact details
Department of Communication and Culture, University of Calgary,
2500 University Drive, NW Calgary, AB Canada T2N 1N4.
lstowe@ucalgary.ca
debjohns@ucalgary.ca
A critical race and class analysis of learning in the
organic farming movement
Catherine Etmanski
Royal Roads University, Canada
The purpose of this paper is to add to a growing body of literature
that critiques the whiteness of the organic farming movement
and analyse potential ramifications of this if farmers are to be
understood as educators. Given that farmers do not necessarily
self-identify as educators, it is important to understand that in
raising this critique, this paper is as much a challenge the author
is extending to herself and other educators interested in food
sovereignty as it is to members of the organic farming movement.
This paper draws from the author’s personal experiences and
interest in the small-scale organic farming movement. It provides a
brief overview of this movement, which is followed by a discussion
of anti-racist food scholarship that critically assesses the inequities
and inconsistencies that have developed as a result of hegemonic
whiteness within the movement. It then demonstrates how a
movement of Indigenous food sovereignty is emerging parallel to
the organic farming movement and how food sovereignty is directly
Catherine Etmanski 485
related to empowerment through the reclamation of cultural,
spiritual, and linguistic practices. Finally, it discusses the potential
benefits of adult educators interested in the organic farming
movement linking their efforts to a broader framework of food
sovereignty, especially through learning to become better allies with
Indigenous populations in different parts of the world.
Introduction
Following the completion of my doctoral studies in 2007, I sought
out an opportunity to work on a small organic farm. As some readers
might understand, at that particular moment in time I felt strongly
compelled to be outdoors, away from my computer, getting my hands
dirty, and working out the rigidity that had developed in my body
through the writing process. I also believed that knowledge of to grow
my own food was important to learn in light of multiple, interrelated
global tragedies, including the global economic crisis, environmental
degradation and climate change, all of which result in concerns for
food security.
Through interactions working side by side in the field, over meals,
or at farmers’ markets, I learned about the daily operations of
this particular farm: the technical details of growing food, as well
as the importance of local agriculture, permaculture, the organic
certification process, crop diversity, soil health, seed saving,
irrigation, food security, human working conditions, animal welfare,
and more. Together with other employees, apprentices, volunteer
visitors on working holidays from around the world, children, and
their friends, I gained a range of new perspectives from the planting
and harvesting of crops to the politics, philosophy, and aesthetics
behind the organic farming movement—not to mention the business
of selling organic vegetables. As I reflected elsewhere:
486 A critical race and class analysis of learning
In my experience, conversations [on the farm] were as rich as any
graduate level classroom, and, for me, they provided a safe space
to ask questions, share my own knowledge and observations from
an outside perspective, and get to know previously unexplored
elements of my physical strength and identity. The key difference
was that these conversations simultaneously engaged my body as
well as my heart and mind, allowed me to experience the seasons
more fully, and solidified theory into practice through the everyday
actions of the farm. (Etmanski, in press, para 19).
Throughout my doctoral work I had explored, among other topics,
principles of adult learning, community leadership, and social justice
through intersectional analyses of power and privilege. As knowledge
is wont to do, these topics informed my experience while I worked
on the farm and continue to inform me to this day. Linked to my
background in adult education, I have recently begun reflecting on the
informal learning that occurs in the context of the small-scale organic
farming movement. This kind of learning can be characterized as
occurring “informally and incidentally, in people’s everyday lives”
(Foley, 1999: 1) by people inside of social movements as well as
those observing from the outside (Hall & Clover, 2005). I recently
documented these reflections in a chapter examining the learningcentred role of farms and farmers in the organic farming movement
(Etmanski, in press).
Yet, as I continue to contemplate this topic, the critical adult educator
in me is curious to understand what opportunities exist to more
explicitly link a social justice perspective (in particular, an anti-racist
and Indigenous Rights perspective) to the small-scale organic farming
movement in general and to my home community more specifically.
Moreover, as documented in my forthcoming chapter mentioned
above, while my experience was that learning certainly happens
informally and incidentally through daily interactions, during my
time on the farm, I also learned that intentional educational efforts
also take place within the organic farming community. These
include organized networks for internship and apprenticeship called
Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) and Stewards
of Irreplaceable Land (SOIL). While none of the farmers with whom
I worked self-identified primarily as educators, the natural corollary
of people seeking out learning experiences on farms is that farmers
do play an educational role in raising awareness—not only about the
techniques used to grow food, but also in the politics of food security.
In light of these recent reflections, the purpose of this paper is to
add to a growing body of literature that critiques the whiteness of
the organic farming movement and analyse potential ramifications
of this if farmers are to be understood as educators. Given that
farmers do not necessarily self-identify as educators, it is important
to understand that in raising this critique, this paper is as much a
challenge I am extending to myself and other educators interested
in food sovereignty as it is to members of the organic farming
movement. To develop this critique, I open with a brief overview
of the organic farming movement, followed by a discussion of
anti-racist food scholarship that critically assesses the inequities
and inconsistencies that have developed as a result of hegemonic
whiteness within the movement. I then demonstrate how a movement
of Indigenous food sovereignty is emerging parallel to the organic
farming movement and discuss the potential benefits of adult
educators within this movement linking their efforts to a broader
framework of food sovereignty, especially amongst Indigenous
populations in different parts of the world.
The organic farming movement
As I have described elsewhere (Etmanski, in press), the organic
farming movement has emerged largely in response to current
industrial agriculture practices around the world. The list of social,
economic, and environmental problems – indeed some would
say crises – associated with the dominant agricultural paradigm
is extensive. To name but a few examples: the extensive use of
natural gas and oil in fertilizers, pesticides, farming infrastructure,
machinery, and food transportation (particularly in the face of Peak
Oil); damages associated with growing mono-crops, cash crops, and
agro-fuels; depletion of soils and rainforests, as well as groundwater
pollution leading to oceanic ‘dead zones’; displacement of Indigenous
peoples and other unethical treatment of both humans and animals;
subsidies and product dumping, which create an increasingly unequal
global marketplace; and finally, the multiple ways in which industrial
agriculture contributes to Climate Change. Many challenges stem
from the technological and chemical changes to agriculture during
the Green Revolution, which ultimately “proved to be unsustainable
as it damaged the environment, caused dramatic loss of biodiversity
and associated traditional knowledge, [favoured] wealthier farmers,
and left many poor farmers deeper in debt” (Altieri, 2009: 102). P.
C. Kesavan and S. Malarvannan (2010) suggested that “today, it is
widely acknowledged that the ‘yield gains’ associated with the green
revolution of the 1960s and 1970s have tapered off largely because
of deterioration in the structure, quality and fertility of the soil” (p.
908). In addition, the spread of patent-protected, fertilizer-dependent
seeds through neo-liberal globalization policies has created debt and
dependency on foreign aid amongst poor farmers around the world
(Altieri, 2009: 103). The use of certain pesticides in treating seeds was
recently linked to the worldwide decline of the honeybee population
(Krupke, Hunt, Eitzer, Andino & Given, 2012), and scientists have
been calling for further investigation into links between the general
use of pesticides or herbicides and the occurrence of cancer in both
children (Hoar Zahm & Ward, 1998) and adults (Dich, Hoar Zahm,
Hanberg & Adami, 1997). The list goes on.
People in many parts of the world have been taking action at both
the local and global level to resist and transform the dominant
agricultural system. In North America, the drive to support local,
organic agriculture and eat in season produce (thereby reducing
the environmental impact of transportation over long distances)
is gaining momentum through such bestselling books as Michael
Pollan’s, In Defense of Food (2008) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma
(2006), as well as through popular documentary films such as, Food
Inc. (Kenner, 2008; helpfully critiqued by Flowers & Swan, 2011).
The gap between food producers and consumers is also narrowing
through such food-centred movements as the 100-Mile Diet (Smith &
MacKinnon, 2007), or the international Slow Food Movement, which
promotes good, clean, and fair food for all (e.g. see Slow Food Canada,
2012). In parallel, the number of organic farms in Canada is on the
rise, particularly in the province of British Columbia, which grew
from 154 certified producers in 1992, to 430 in 2001 (MacNair, 2004:
10). The Certified Organic Associations of BC (COABC, 2012) lists 68
certified organic farms on Vancouver Island (where I live) and the
surrounding Gulf Islands—and this number is complemented by an
abundance of non-certified farms, farms in transition, and backyard,
community, or school gardens (LifeCycles, 2012).
Anti-racist food scholarship
Despite this growing movement around food and organic farming
anti-racist food justice scholars such as Alison Hope Alkon and
Julian Agyeman (2011) have suggested that the North American
alterative food movement “may itself be something of a monoculture”
(p. 2). These authors’ critique is sadly ironic given the widely held
adverse opinion of mono-cropping practices within the small-scale
organic food movement. It is particularly problematic in my home
context since Canadians have long grappled with the concepts of
multiculturalism and diversity. The Canadian Multicultural Act
(Canada, 1985), for example, is an attempt to promote equity and
equality amongst people of all cultural backgrounds. Yet, proponents
of critical race theory have suggested that the rhetoric surrounding
multiculturalism and diversity has become so powerful that it can
render the majority of Canadians ignorant to current and real
interpersonal and structural acts of racism. Sherene Razack (1998)
suggested that the denial of racism has become “integral to white
Canadian identity” (p. 11) while Jo-Ann Lee and John Lutz (2005)
further contended that “liberal multiculturalism does not address
racism systematically, because racism is viewed as an individual
pathology and not seen as part of the social order” (p.17). In this way,
many Canadians (among others) have a tendency to either deny that
discrimination exists, or view the results of interconnected ideologies
of discrimination (Miles, 1989) as the anecdotal actions on behalf of
ignorant individuals rather than systemic outcomes. Nevertheless, as
will be discussed here, the so-called ‘whiteness’ of the North American
organic food movement has not gone unnoticed, an observation that
reflects my own experience of the local organic farming movement as
well.
In their edited compilation entitled, Cultivating Food Justice,
Alkon and Agyeman weave together fifteen chapters outlining the
various ways in which race and class are implicated or ignored in just
conceptions of food sustainability. Topics range from legal regulation
surrounding some Chinese immigrants’ agricultural practices
(Minkoff-Zern, Peluso, Sowerwine, & Getz, 2011) and hunger or food
insecurity amongst farm workers’ in mainstream agriculture (Brown
& Getz, 2011), to farmland ownership amongst Black Nationalist
religious organizations (McCutcheon, 2011) and resisting or breaking
mainstream stereotypes of (‘white’) veganism (Harper, 2011). Rachel
Slocum further outlined the multiple lenses through which scholars
are viewing “the intricacies of race, power and food” (2007: 520),
which echo many of the topics mentioned above. These include, but
are not limited to: the racial politics of various foods; food, identity,
and nationalism; representations of difference via food; the roles of
racialised groups in food production (e.g. in terms of agricultural
knowledge and labour); colonialism, neo-colonialism, and settler
society in global food circuits; the meanings of food consumption for
differently located people in the spaces of body, home, community
and nation; and, finally, the racialised aspects of organic food
production as well as the social movement (outlined above) in which
this food production is embedded. Due to space constraints, I will
not go into detail on each of these topics here, but interested readers
could see Slocum (2007) for a list of useful references.
The overwhelming consensus among these authors is that
the alternative food movement is dominated by a Euro-white
membership that promotes ecologically-friendly, ethical food while—
with a sense of tragic irony—largely ignoring racialised injustices, “an
omission which reflects its adherents’ race and class privilege” (Alkon
& Agyeman, 2011: 331). Said differently, and particularly in relation
to a U.S.-based community food security coalition, “the movement’s
whiteness has been brought up at every annual conference” (Slocum,
2006: 331). My own whiteness, and that of many people involved in
the local food movement where I live, reflects this reality as well—a
reality that provides the impetus for writing this paper.
As a result, although the alternative food movements may intend
to promote ethical food practices, in practice sometimes normative
assumptions based on dominant values are perpetuated through a
lack of reflexivity around privilege. These may include unquestioned
narratives that (a) ethical food necessarily must cost more and (b)
if only people knew what was in their food and the unethical means
by which it is produced, they/we would change their/our habits
(Guthman, 2011). In flagging these assumptions, Guthman is not
dismissing the global trade policies and processes through which
certain foods are inequitably regulated or subsidized (expanded upon
by Holt-Giménez, 2011); rather, she is suggesting that by uncritically
accepting that ethical food unfortunately but necessarily costs more
we limit our imagination and ability to argue for ethical food for all.
Moreover, our motivations for eating the way we do are far more
complex than the ‘if only they knew’ narrative would suggest (see also
Flowers & Swan, 2011).
Because they are dominant, such assumptions, values, and norms
typically go unquestioned, unnamed, and unnoticed by those in
positions of relative social power—an absent centre “with the power
to define itself only in terms of what it designates its opposites”
(Pajaczkowska & Young, 1992:202). Said differently, whiteness
presides as “the unmarked category against which difference is
constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to
acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural
relations” (Lipsitz, 2002: 61-62). According to Brenda McMahon
whiteness includes at least three layers: (2) the physical, phenotypal
characteristics and limited skin pigmentation associated with Western
Europeans, (2) the social privilege associated with dominant, EuroWestern cultural norms, and (3) the unarticulated beliefs, policies,
and practices that maintain the status quo and reproduce power
amongst ‘white’ people and those who have more closely assimilated
to ‘white’ cultural practices (2007: 687). Julie Guthman further
proposed that “the unconscious habits of white privilege are in some
respects more pernicious than the explicit racism of white supremacy
because [they are] not examined” (2011: 266). As the ‘if only they
knew’ narrative implies, when such assumptions are left unexamined,
even well-intentioned individuals and movements for social justice
risk unconsciously measuring others against these unarticulated
expectations. In so doing, they unintentionally reproduce the
discriminatory practices they may have sought to overcome.
All this is not to say that people of colour do not participate in the
alternative food movement; indeed various streams of the movement
exist and people participating within them are diverse as suggested
by Priscilla McCutcheon (2011) and A. Breeze Harper (2011) above.
However, proponents of alternative food practices and other
educators ought to be mindful not to misconstrue the challenge as
“a diversity problem rather than as a relational process embedded
in society that constitutes community food” (Slocum, 2006: 331).
In other words, since whiteness is hegemonic in North America,
the alternative food movements located therein reflect this cultural
hegemony. Food justice must therefore be analysed through a more
intersectional lens that includes an understanding of structural
racism and classism instead of individual acts of exclusion or racism
alone (Holt-Giménez, 2011: 319). This somewhat paradoxically locates
the organic farming movement as both alternative and mainstream
at once, suggesting that in fact there are multiple, loosely related,
occasionally overlapping movements underway. For the remainder
of this paper, when I refer to the organic farming movement I am
referring to this mainstream, Euro-white alternative food movement,
to differentiate it from the Indigenous1 food movement discussed
below.
Indigenous Food Sovereignty (IFS)
Despite the current surge of interest in local, organic foods,
colonialism came close to destroying the Indigenous food systems
– and the Indigenous peoples – of Canada. As Ball described,
Indigenous people in Canada have “withstood the near destruction
of their populations, social structures, and cultures as a result of
colonial interventions” (2005: 3). These colonial interventions have
included violent acts of warfare, exposure to diseases, segregation
and restriction of travel through a system of land reservations,
forced sterilization, forced confinement of Indigenous children
in government sponsored Residential Schools, and social policies
that promoted the legal adoption of Indigenous children into
white families (Ball, 2005). Through a recent Canadian Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, “the government now recognizes that
the consequences of the Indian Residential Schools policy were
profoundly negative and that this policy has had a lasting and
damaging impact on Aboriginal culture, heritage and language”
(Regan, 2010: 1). Nevertheless, the legacy of these policies has an
ongoing impact not only on culture, heritage, and language, but also
on food.
Over the past few decades, rates of chronic, non-communicable
diseases such as obesity, type II diabetes, heart disease, and some
forms of cancer have been rising disproportionately amongst
Indigenous peoples (Damman, Eide, & Kuhnlein, 2008; Milburn,
2004; Power, 2008; Waziyatawin Wilson, 2004; Whiting &
Mackenzie, 1998). “Canada’s Aboriginal people, for example, have
rates of diabetes some three times the national average and higher
rates of other chronic diseases” (Milburn, 2004: 414). These diseases
are directly attributed to the ongoing effects of colonization and the
Westernization of Indigenous populations worldwide, which means
that changes “in diets, patterns of work and leisure have occurred
with industrialization, urbanization, economic development, and
the globalization of markets” (Damman, Eide, & Kuhnlein, 2008:
135). These dramatic lifestyle changes have resulted in a ‘nutrition
transition’ away from traditional foods (sometimes called wild or
country foods) toward highly refined and processed store-bought
foods.
Factors influencing the decline of traditional food intake amongst
Indigenous people include but are not limited to:
• increasing availability of Western foods, including in some
cases culturally inappropriate food aid (e.g. the ‘boxes of
hope’ distributed amongst poor Kolla and Jujuy households in
Argentina, see Damman, Eide, & Kuhnlein, 2008);
• migration to urban centres where people are more apt to join the
mainstream economy while adapting to urban lifestyles, leaving
less time to fish, hunt, or gather traditional foods. This also results
in fewer opportunities for knowledge transmission from elders to
the next generations and weakening social bonds of reciprocity in
the exchange of traditional foods;
• appropriation of traditional territories by governments and
corporations, creating displacement from and declining access to
land;
• decreased overall knowledge of traditional food practices due to
the legacy of colonial education, including government supplied
nutrition guides (e.g. those that recommend milk to lactose
intolerant populations, see Milburn, 2004);
• effects of TV advertising and marketing of not only Western foods,
but also of Western lifestyle;
• contaminants found in some traditional foods (e.g. mercury in
fish and marine mammals, which are important staples in the
Inuit diet in the Canadian North; see Chan & Receveur, 2000), as
well as animal extinction and changing migratory patterns due to
climate change; and finally,
• feelings of shame and cultural inferiority associated with eating
traditional foods, especially amongst youth.
This last point is linked to Fanon’s (1967) concept of internalized
racism, where individuals outside the dominating culture, particularly
colonized peoples, begin to accept the barrage of racist messages in
their environment and come to believe that their differences from the
dominant group truly are deficits or weaknesses.
For these and many other reasons, Indigenous leaders, scholars, and
activists such as Waziyatawin Angela Wilson argue that:
as Indigenous knowledge is revalued and revived, our people
become stronger and we fuel our capacity for meaningful
resistance to colonization. Indeed, across Canada and in various
parts of the world, Indigenous peoples are mobilizing to promote,
protect and, in some cases, reclaim pre-colonial practices
related to food (Baskin, 2008; Milburn, 2004; Waziyatawin
Wilson, 2004). The importance of this work, then, cannot be
overstated; the recovery of Indigenous knowledge is Indigenous
empowerment” (2004: 371).
Food, therefore, cannot be viewed in isolation from other forms of
Indigenous knowledge. Instead, it must be understood holistically in
the context of interdependent relationships between land, language,
culture, arts and crafts, health, spirituality, lifestyle, and general ways
of being in the world. The movement of Indigenous food sovereignty
therefore strengthens Indigenous people’s “ability to respond to
our own needs for healthy, culturally adapted Indigenous foods”
(Indigenous Food Systems Network, n.d., section on Indigenous Food
Sovereignty, para. 1).
Though the language of food sovereignty may be current, the
practices, knowledge, values, and wisdom necessary to maintain
both autonomy from the industrial agricultural system and healthy,
respectful relations with the land are not new. For example, the
Indigenous Food Systems Network promotes four principles based in
traditional knowledge that are related to food sovereignty:
Sacred or divine sovereignty: Food is a gift from the
Creator; in this respect the right to food is sacred and cannot be
constrained or recalled by colonial laws, policies and institutions.
Indigenous food sovereignty is fundamentally achieved
by upholding our sacred responsibility to nurture healthy,
interdependent relationships with the land, plants and animals
that provide us with our food.
Participatory: IFS is fundamentally based on “action”, or the day
to day practice of maintaining cultural harvesting strategies. To
maintain Indigenous food sovereignty as a living reality for both
present and future generations, continued participation in cultural
harvesting strategies at all of the individual, family, community
and regional levels is key.
Self-determination: The ability to respond to our own needs
for healthy, culturally adapted Indigenous foods. The ability to
make decisions over the amount and quality of food we hunt,
fish, gather, grow and eat. Freedom from dependence on grocery
stores or corporately controlled food production, distribution and
consumption in industrialized economies.
Policy: IFS attempts to reconcile Indigenous food and cultural
values with colonial laws and policies and mainstream economic
activities. IFS thereby provides a restorative framework for
policy reform in forestry, fisheries, rangeland, environmental
conservation, health, agriculture, and rural and community
development. (See listing for Indigenous Food Systems Network in
references.)
While these four guiding principles provide a framework for
Indigenous food sovereignty (in Canada), they are related in purpose
if not by signature to a global Indigenous and peasant-based
movement for food sovereignty referred to as La Via Campesina
(2012) or the peasant road (see also Aurelie Desmarais, 2007;
Borras, Jr., 2008; Martínez-Torres & Rosset, 2010; Torrez, 2011).
This movement constitutes a transnational “peasant-led network
that has grown to represent 200 million farmers in 70 countries
in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, and encompassing
approximately 150 local and national organizations” (Etmanski, in
press, para 8). Every country’s right to autonomous decision-making
power over agricultural policy, in consultation with peasants and
Indigenous peoples is a key element of the Via Campesina movement
(Schuurman, 1995).
As mentioned above, since multiple, occasionally overlapping
food movements exist, the extent to which these global actions to
promote Indigenous Food Sovereignty are understood within the
more mainstream elements of the organic farming movement are
unknown. In my experience of this movement, I have learned about
the structures (e.g. corporate interests in unjust global trade policies)
that give rise to the dominant agricultural system, but rarely have
I had conversations about the acts of racism that permitted the
near decimation of the original inhabitants of the on which we now
farm. Certainly, some farmers actively promote this kind of analysis,
for example, a grassroots group in this region, the Rainbow Chard
Collective, makes reference to La Via Campesina and argues that
their own “work as food activists is not done until it is made accessible
to all” (Rainbow Chard Collective, March, 2011, n.p.). Although
these larger struggles for food sovereignty are directly linked to the
political context of the organic farming movement, whether or not
the privilege of whiteness precludes awareness of these struggles is a
topic that merits more research.
Food as a potential means of solidarity
Although the organic farming movement and Indigenous food
sovereignty movement are fundamentally related through their focus
on food, with proponents no doubt intersecting and overlapping
to some extent, they appear to be emerging on parallel rather than
deeply interconnected trajectories. While some scholars have
(cautiously) suggested that organic farmers’ knowledge is a form
of Indigenous knowledge (Sumner, 2008), others have proposed
“that it is essential to open an inquiry into sustainable food practices
that do not operate in opposition to, but rather autonomously from
the mainstream foods movement” (Mares & Peña, 2011: 200). As
described above, since reclaiming Indigenous food systems is an
act of self-determination, empowerment, and resistance to ongoing
racism and the effects of colonization, the movement for Indigenous
food sovereignty will likely continue gaining momentum on a parallel
course to the organic farming movement. My intention, therefore, is
not to suggest that Indigenous Food Sovereignty become subsumed
under the organic food movement.
Yet, in returning to the question of what opportunities exist to
more explicitly link an intersectional social justice perspective (in
particular, an anti-racist and Indigenous Rights perspective) to the
small-scale organic farming movement, Alison Hope Alkon and Julian
Agyeman put forward a very practical stance. They have called for
solidarity of effort by virtue of the relatively privileged members of the
organic farming movement seeing “the low-income communities and
communities of color most deeply harmed by industrial agriculture
as potential allies” (Alkon & Agyeman, 2011: 332). Otherwise stated,
“if activists in the food movement are to go beyond providing
alternatives and truly challenge agribusiness’s destructive power, they
will need a broad coalition of supporters” (Alkon & Agyeman, 2011:
4; see also Mares & Peña, 2011). Respectful engagement will no doubt
mean moving beyond a superficial or aesthetic desire to become
more diverse, toward a critically reflexive relationship based on
mutual learning, not to mention a level of tolerance for the imperfect
politics of solidarity (DuPuis, Harrison, & Goodman, 2011). In my
community, this will also involve unsettling the settler (Regan, 2010)
through a recognition that the organic farming movement exists by
virtue of settlement on unceded Indigenous lands.
Said differently, this call for solidarity across difference is reflected
in Vandana Shiva’s (2005) work to demonstrate the symbolic
link between the longstanding practice of seed saving to maintain
biodiversity and the inherent value of human diversity. She argued
that:
The seeds being pushed to extinction carry within them seeds of
other ways of thinking about nature, and other ways of fulfilling
our needs. […] Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury
in our times. It is a survival imperative. It is the pre-condition
for freedom for all. In diversity, the smallest has a place and a
role, and allowing the small to flourish becomes the real test of
freedom. (Shiva, 2005: 94).
As such, not only does solidarity across difference offer a broader
coalition of support against the practices of industrial agriculture,
in these times where we are faced with increasingly complex
socio-economic and ecological challenges, the value of not only
remembering, but working together to actively regenerate diverse
knowledges cannot be underestimated.
Nevertheless, as farmers and educators in the organic farming
movement finds an appropriate balance between respecting
autonomy and seeking ways of working in solidarity across difference,
it will also be useful to understand that not all knowledge is meant
to be shared with all people at all times. “This notion of knowledge-
sharing, or a freely accessible knowledge commons is itself a eurocentric assumption” (Corntassel & Gaudry, in press). This means
that Elders and knowledge-keepers may choose the conditions under
which certain knowledge can and will be shared. Members of the
organic farming movement who seek to work across difference must
respect this fundamental right to autonomy and desire to protect
knowledges that were nearly decimated through colonial practices.
Conclusion
This paper has aimed to raise awareness amongst educators
interested in learning through the organic farming movement, by
suggesting that we ought to attend more explicitly to the politics of
race, class, and other dimensions of power and privilege embedded
in this movement. The critique presented here represents an area
of potential growth not only for farmers, but also for consumers of
organic or alternative foods. However, responsibility to critically
examine the embedded Eurocentric assumptions of this movement
and work to mitigate the detrimental outcomes of such assumptions
extends far beyond the role of farmers and consumers, especially as
farmers themselves are often facing economic constraints (Pilgeram,
2011; Tunnicliffe, 2011). Those of us who self-identify as educators,
including me, have a role to play in raising awareness and creating
an infrastructure of support for deepening the anti-racist and class
analysis within the organic or alternative food movement. This
analysis includes acknowledging that although members of this
movement may be struggling against the detrimental effects of
industrial agriculture worldwide, many of us are simultaneously
benefitting from the privilege of whiteness. Moreover, this privilege
is not necessarily perpetuated by individual acts of racism, though
they may of course occur. Rather the legacy of colonialism has created
and maintained structural injustice for Indigenous peoples in many
parts of the world, injustice perpetuated through reduced access to
healthy, culturally appropriate foods. As Indigenous peoples fight for
sovereignty, not only of food, but of cultural, linguistic, and spiritual
practices that serve to regenerate their health, adult educators
committed to the goal of food justice have an opportunity to learn
how to become better allies.
Notes
1 In line with Waziyatawin Wilson, I am giving preference to the word
“Indigenous” over other terminology such as First Nations, Aboriginal
Peoples, American Indians and so on, “because of the implicit notion of
coming from the land and being of the land, [which supports] a political
declaration about [Indigenous peoples’] claims to the land” (2004: 371).
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About the author
Catherine Etmanski is an Assistant Professor in the School of
Leadership Studies at Royal Roads University, Canada. Her current
program of research focuses on examples of collaborative leadership
and informal, experiential learning in the small-scale organic
farming movement, with a particular focus on food sovereignty on
Vancouver Island. She continues to draw upon her doctoral research
(2007), which employed arts-based research to promote and explore
transformative learning and embodied ways of knowing with
international graduate students..
Contact details
School of Leadership Studies, Faculty of Social and Applied Sciences,
Royal Roads University, 2005 Sooke Road, Victoria, BC, Canada
V9B 5Y2.
Email: catherine.etmanski@royalroads.ca
Food pedagogies in Japan:
From the implementation of the Basic Law on Food Education to
Fukushima
Cornelia Reiher
University of Halle, Germany
Japan’s Basic Law on Food Education (Shokuiku kihonhō) was
enacted in June 2005 as a response to various concerns related to
food and nutrition, such as food scandals, an increase in obesity
and lifestyle-related diseases and an assumed loss of traditional
food culture. The Law defines food education (shokuiku) rather
vaguely as the acquisition of knowledge about food and the ability
to make appropriate food choices. In this paper, my focus is the
impact of shokuiku on discourses about food safety in relation
to the nuclear disaster. I will address the following problems:
Firstly, the assumption that ‘domestic food products are the safest
in the world’; secondly, the power relations between municipal
authorities, producers and consumers in Japan; and thirdly, the
question of whether food pedagogies can adequately address food
safety concerns after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. I argue that,
although the Basic Law offers a holistic approach to food in theory,
508 Food pedagogies in Japan
with its focus on nutrition and the emphasis on domestic food, food
pedagogies, practiced according to the Basic Law cannot adequately
deal with the food safety problems that Japanese consumers face
after the Fukushima nuclear accident. Because of the ignorance
regarding food safety issues from official sides, Japanese consumers
are left with a lack of awareness for these issues. Therefore,
stakeholders who are not included in the state’s shokuiku campaign,
such as consumer co-ops and Civil Radioactivity Measurement
Stations try to provide knowledge about food to enable Japanese
consumers to make appropriate food choices.
Introduction
In March 2011, Northern Japan was hit by a triple disaster –
earthquake, tsunami and nuclear catastrophe – that killed almost
19.000 people and left Japan with the worst nuclear catastrophe since
Chernobyl. The aftermath of this nuclear crisis especially threatens
the safety of domestic food products. When the nuclear disaster at
the power plant Fukushima Daiichi occurred in March 2011, large
amounts of radioactive materials were released into the atmosphere
and into the sea and groundwater. Only a few days after the accident,
radioactive iodine was discovered in vegetables and milk. Today,
caesium in food poses the largest problem to farmers from Fukushima
and its neighbouring prefectures, as well as to consumers in the entire
country. The Japanese government set provisional safety levels in
late March 2011, which were revised and lowered in April 2012. The
exposure limits for caesium in normal food, such as vegetables, grain
or meat, were lowered from 500 Becquerel per kilogram to 100 Bq/
kg (MHLW, 2012). More than one year after the nuclear disaster,
irradiated food detected still exceeds old and new safety standards
(Mainichi Shinbun 29.03.2012).
Cornelia Reiher 509
In April 2005, the Basic Law on Food Education (shokuiku kihonhō)
was enacted. This was against the background of various concerns
related to food and nutrition, such as numerous food safety scandals,
an increase in obesity and lifestyle-related diseases, and the fear of
the loss of traditional food culture. It was developed by the Cabinet
Office (Naikakufu) in co-operation with the Ministry of Education,
Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), the Ministry of
Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) and the Ministry of
Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW). In 2006, the Diet passed a
five-year Basic Plan for the Promotion of Food Education (shokuiku
suishin kihon keikaku). In 2011, the second Basic Plan was released.
Shokuiku is defined in the Basic Law as ‘the acquisition of knowledge
about food and of the ability to make appropriate food choices’
(Naikakufu, 2005). The term shokuiku is usually translated into
English as ‘food education’, although alternative terms such as
‘nurturing through eating’ (Takeda, 2008) exist as well. But even
authors (Kojima 2011, Kimura 2011, Mah 2010) who use the
translation food education point out that ‘shokuiku is not limited to
just a food education or nutritional guidelines’ (Kojima 2011: 50).
Since the English-language term food education is too reminiscent
of the rather limited nutritional and dietary education in AngloAmerican countries, I prefer to use the term food pedagogies when I
refer to the very broad approach to shokuiku envisioned within the
Basic Law, as food and nutrition (shoku) are broadly defined in Article
6 of the law as ‘all kinds of processes ranging from food production to
food consumption’ (Naikakufu, 2005).
However, I argue that, although the Basic Law offers a holistic
approach to food in theory, with its focus on nutrition and the
emphasis on domestic food, food pedagogies, practiced according to
the Basic Law cannot adequately deal with the food safety problems
that Japanese consumers face. On the contrary, with the law’s
emphasis on firstly, domestic food, and secondly, the urge to support
the farmers in the Tōhoku area after the triple disaster (Naikakufu,
2012); shokuiku actually endangers the health of Japanese citizens.
This pro-producer stance has a long tradition in Japanese agricultural
and consumer politics (MacLachlan 2002, Mulgan 2005a, b). In
addition, the long held assumption that Japanese food is safer than
imported food makes it difficult to sensitise Japanese consumers to
alternatives. The paper concludes that in the context of the nuclear
disaster the Japanese government is unable to achieve the goal it has
formulated in the Basic Law and its related action plans: to provide
adequate knowledge about food to enable the Japanese citizen to
make appropriate food choices. This paper is based on the analysis
of various materials including laws, national and local plans for
the improvement of food pedagogies, articles by social scientists
critically commenting on food pedagogies, as well as insights from
a recent qualitative consumer survey I conducted in Summer 2011,
and qualitative interviews with local nutritionists, food distribution
networks’ members and farmers I carried out in February 2012 in
Japan.
Principles of the Basic Law
Food pedagogies (shokuiku) comprise intellectual (chiiku), moral
(tokuiku), and physical (taiiku) education. The physical aspect of
education involves the concept of healthy nutrition. According to
the Basic Law, this means a regular and well-balanced diet that
consists of at least three meals a day as well as sufficient exercise.
On the moral level, the Basic Law focuses on teaching children to
learn gratitude towards food, nature, and everybody involved in food
production. The intellectual aspect of these food pedagogies includes
the acquisition of food-related knowledge (Shimomura, 2007). The
wide perspective on food, however, does not mean that the Basic Law
and its related campaigns aim at empowering consumers by providing
knowledge about the ills of the modern food system, as Kimura (2010:
477) points out. Shokuiku rather focuses on ‘creating consumers’ who
Cornelia Reiher 511
make the right purchasing decisions but does not name and address
actually existing neoliberalising processes of the food system that are
also responsible for food safety problems. This becomes especially
evident when private food corporations such as supermarkets or
fast-food chains such as Aeon or Mos Burger participate in shokuiku
activities (ibid).
The aims of the Basic Law are:
1. t he establishment of a national campaign for the promotion
of food pedagogies
2. the implementation of a state-supported system for the protection of ‘traditional Japanese food culture’
3. the enforcement of measures to ensure food security
4. the promotion of healthy nutrition (Kobe Toshi Mondai
Kenkyūsho, 2006).
These aims are to be implemented through co-operation between
the state, the local authorities, food-related businesses, farmers,
educators, and families (Naikakufu 2005: Article 9-13). The Japanese
government claims that, from an international perspective, the law
is a unique concept to Japan, because of its wide approach to food
pedagogies compared to the West (MAFF 2006: 4).
Criticism of the Basic Law
The Basic Law has been criticised on a number of counts. First, for
attempting to intervene in the private sphere of Japanese citizens;
secondly, for its anachronistic image of Japanese society, family,
and gender relations (Kojima 2011, Kimura 2011) and thirdly, for
its neoliberal approach (Sasaki, 2006). This neoliberal approach,
according to Shimomura (2008), becomes evident, because the law
mainly sets only responsibilities for local authorities and citizens.
According to Kojima (2011) shokuiku is merely understood as a
responsibility for citizens, but not as a civil right. This means that, for
instance, Japanese citizens are held responsible for consuming more
domestically grown foods in order to raise the self-sufficiency ratio
out of a ‘sense of responsibility for the nation’, although domestic
food is more expensive, but the Japanese government does not
offer assistance to compensate citizens for their expenses (Kojima
2011: 54). In addition, these neoliberal tendencies are also met by a
sometimes acrimonious nationalism, as Takeda (2008) has detected
in the law.
In this paper, my focus is the impact of shokuiku on discourses about
food safety in relation to the nuclear disaster. Overall, the Japanese
government has been harshly criticised for acting too late; for denying
the dangers emitting from irradiated food; and for their weak attitude
towards testing during the last year (Foodwatch, 2011). Moreover,
government officials encouraged Japanese consumers to buy farm
products from Fukushima and the neighbouring prefectures to
support disaster-stricken farmers. The government’s stance on the
food safety problem tended to favour producers and not to consider
consumers’ interests. The following statement by a MAFF official
illustrates this: ‘We hear the calls for more disclosure, but revealing
more detailed data would just hurt too many farmers’ (Fackler, 2012).
A columnist from the Kyūshū newspaper Saga Shinbun gets at these
issues in June 2011:
Food safety and the carefree consumption of food are important
topics of shokuiku. However, due to radiation released from the
damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant we now look at
our domestic food products that we thought of as the safest in the
world, with increasing concern. […] At the end of last month, the
Board of education [BOE] in Kashima city in Ibaraki prefecture
published the following information concerning school lunch: ‘we
are obliged to use local food, but at the moment we prefer to order
ingredients from West Japan.’ Hereupon the BOE was criticized
by local farmers for supporting harmful rumours (fuhyō higai).
Shortly after, the content of the BOE’s website was revised as
follows: ‘We cannot guarantee all local food products’ compliance
Cornelia Reiher 513
with safety standards, so we use food from West Japan instead
of those local food products. We use those local products as
ingredients whose safety is ensured’ […] According to the second
Basic Plan on Food Pedagogies, the focus of food pedagogies in the
next five years lies on ‘the transfer of knowledge about food and
the ability to choose food, and to promote food pedagogies that
enable people to practice a healthy diet. Tasks [of food pedagogies]
include the discussion of the ties between families and the regions,
with complex topics such as the food self-sufficiency ratio,
but the most urgent problem at the moment is the radioactive
contamination of food. (Taira, 2011)
This quote refers to three related problems I will address in the
following: Firstly, the assumption that ‘domestic food products
are the safest in the world’; secondly, the power relations between
municipal authorities, producers and consumers in Japan; and
thirdly, the question of whether food pedagogies can adequately
address food safety concerns after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
The Basic Law on Food Education (shokuiku kihonhō), defines its
shokuiku as ‘the acquisition of knowledge about food and of the
ability to make appropriate food choices’ (Naikakufu, 2005). But
a critical question is: who is supposed to provide this knowledge?
Pedagogy has been defined by sociologist of education, Basil
Bernstein (2000: 78) as: a ‘process whereby somebody(s) acquires
new forms or develops existing forms of conduct, knowledge,
practice and criteria from somebody(s) or something deemed to be
an appropriate provider and evaluator’. But we need to ask: who are
these appropriate providers and evaluators in the Japanese case? In
particular, whose interests are they serving in relation to the threats
posed by irradiated food? To answer these questions, I will examine
three different groups of stakeholders at the centre of food pedagogies
in Japan: municipalities, food producers and consumer co-operatives.
I will compare their current practices with the goals envisaged by the
Japanese government in the Basic Law.
The Basic Law on Food Pedagogies
Food pedagogies, food safety and food security
Before comparing the approaches of the aforementioned three groups
of stakeholders, I will provide a brief outline of how ideas about ‘food
safety’ are presented as interconnected with ‘food security’ in the
Basic Law. This is vital to an understanding of the difficulties most
of these stakeholders and the Japanese government have had with
taking a clear stance against irradiated food from the affected areas
in the aftermath of the disaster. According to FAO (2003: 29) ‘food
security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and
economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets
their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy
life’. Food safety refers to an aspired absence of health risks in
relation with the consumption of food (Busch, 2004).
In essence, the Law and its related plans promote the image of
domestic food as safe. In addition, they make it the responsibility
of the individual consumer to eat more domestic food products,
especially rice. They do this as a solution to the low food self-supply
capacity. Let me quote from Articles 7 and 8 (Naikakufu, 2005) that
deal with the food self-sufficiency ratio and food safety:
Contribution to an increase of the food self-sufficiency ratio
Article 7: Food pedagogies have to promote our country’s
outstanding traditional food culture, nutrition that revitalises
regional characteristics, and food production and consumption
that takes into account its balance with the environment; it has to
further the citizens’ understanding of the situation of our country’s
food demand and supply, and through the planning of exchange
between food producers and consumers, it contributes to the
revitalisation of farm and fishing communities and to the increase
of our country’s food self-sufficiency ratio.
The role of food pedagogies for securing food safety
Article 8: Food pedagogies mean, given that securing food safety
and a carefree consumption are the base of a healthy nutrition,
to offer a wide array of information about food and in the first
Cornelia Reiher 515
place on food safety and to exchange views on these issues. By
furthering citizens’ knowledge and their understanding about
food, [food pedagogies] aim for citizens who realise an appropriate
nutrition and who approach this aim by a positive stance towards
international co-operation.
Interestingly, food pedagogies, according to the law, only promote
knowledge about food safety. The law does not address the need for
better controls, higher safety standards or labelling. Since the 1990s,
MAFF, one of the initiating ministries involved in the law, promotes
the preservation of Japan’s food self-supply capacity. It claims that
this is necessary, in order to ensure the stable supply of food at stable
prices and maintaining food safety (Mulgan 2005b: 165). Japan’s
food self-sufficiency rate has decreased steadily from 73% (based
on calories) in 1965 to 40% in 1998. Since then, it has stabilised on
around 40% as average level (MAFF, 2011).
According to Kojima (2011: 51), the term shokuiku itself was
introduced to National Diet Proceedings in 2003 by Takebe Tsutomu,
then head of the MAFF. He had learned the term from journalist
Sunada Toshiko, who had used the word to refer to nutritional and
dietary education in foreign countries. From that time, the term
appeared in MAFF publications as one of its policy objectives. Before
this, due to agricultural protectionism and high food prices, the
interests of farmers and consumers were perceived as conflicting.
Politically, the discursive combination of producers’ interests and
consumers’ interests, according to Mulgan (2005b: 165), became
necessary in order to justify MAFF’s rejection of agricultural trade
liberalisation. Due to the lack of competition on the food market that
this rejection caused, food prices in Japan stayed high. Consequently,
to justify high food prices for domestic food produce, consumers
had to believe that these products were safer than imported
foods. However, since 2000, Japanese consumers were faced with
successive food scandals around domestic food safety. Most of
them involved Japanese producers such as Snowbrand, Meathope
or Fujiya (Kawagishi 2008: 17). Nevertheless, when in 2008 the
so-called gyōza jiken occurred and frozen dumplings filled with meat
from China caused food poisoning to several Japanese consumers,
the blame was laid on Chinese producers only, although safety
inspections by their Japanese trading partners were also insufficient,
because they valued low costs over safety issues (ibid. 104). In a
qualitative survey I conducted among 60 consumers from Kyūshū,
Kansai and Kantō in 2011, 51% still responded to the question ‘What
do you think about imported food from China?’ with ‘I would rather
not buy/ eat it’.
Takeda (2008) also points out this form of nationalism
inherent within the Basic Law on Food Pedagogies. Despite the
acknowledgment of the hybrid nature of Japanese food within
Japanese society, its particular Japanese elements are singled out
and positively opposed to the non-Japanese elements. This becomes
evident when Western-style food is considered unhealthy, while
Japanese-style food is referred to as a ‘dietary pattern that […] suits
Japan’s climate and culture’ (MAFF, 2006). Ohnuki-Thierney (1995:
232) elaborates on how “amid a flood of Western foods, the Japanese
continue to reaffirm their sense of self by reconstructing their own
‘traditional’ food. Rice is the defining feature of the ‘traditional
Japanese cuisine’.” However, the ‘purity’ of Japanese white rice has
been threatened – from the perspective of MAFF officials and farmers
– by trade deregulation since the 1990s when, for the first time, rice
from Southeast Asia entered Japan and was sometimes even mixed
with Japanese rice.
However, more than half of the food Japanese consumers buy
and eat is imported. According to JETRO (2010), this particularly
concerns seafood, meat, grains and vegetables. About a quarter of
all imported fresh and processed foods originate from the US, while
20% is imported from China. This problem is also addressed as ‘the
problem of the dependence on food from overseas’ (Naikakufu, 2005)
Cornelia Reiher 517
in the introduction of the Basic Law, where it is mentioned as one of
the problems that have to be solved by shokuiku. It therefore is quite
surprising when the mass media ascribe problems related to food
safety solely to imported foods, as the example of the gyōza incident
demonstrates.
Shokuiku practitioners
Having provided a brief introduction to some of the key terms and
politics in the Law, I now provide a summary of each of the three
‘deliverers’ or ‘pedagogues’.
Municipalities
The two key terms I am using are municipalities and prefectures.
By these terms, I mean different levels of government on local and
more regional levels. Japan is divided into 47 prefectures which each
consist of cities, towns and villages – the municipalities. In Article 10,
the Basic Law defines the role of the municipalities and prefectures
(Naikakufu, 2005). They are expected to co-operate with the central
government to plan their own shokuiku activities and to implement
them on the basis of the understanding of shokuiku defined in the
Basic Law. Prefectures are requested to design their own plans for
the promotion of shokuiku, based on which the municipalities in
each prefecture should draw up individual programs. Although
governments in countries like the US or Germany launched nutrition
programs such as “Five A Day” to promote the consumption of
fruits and vegetables, there are no concrete expectations for local
authorities connected with food education. This difference can
be explained by the centralised state structure and the top-down
structure of policy implementation processes. Although local
autonomy in Japan was strengthened since the 1990s, the attempt to
set responsibilities for local authorities in the Basic Law is strongly
reminiscent of the systems called kikan inin jimu, according to
which the central government could utilise local governments as its
administrative agencies (Hüstebeck, 2009).
However, decentralisation has contributed to a certain lack of
enthusiasm for shokuiku on the local level. This is because various
plans touching upon issues of nutrition and food were already in
place before the central government passed the Basic Law on Food
Pedagogies. While the shokuiku kihonhō commits local authorities
to drafting individual support plans, it fails to explain whether and
how older plans can be linked to the new plan and to provide financial
resources (Shimomura, 2007).
Regarding their content, most local plans define shokuiku in
accordance with the Basic Law. However, many add local issues,
emphasising the uniqueness of local agriculture and of the prefectures
themselves. Food pedagogies in many rural municipalities are an
important form of support for local agriculture (Shimomura, 2007),
community planning, and regional revitalisation (Reiher, 2009).
Generally speaking, shokuiku by municipalities comprises cooking
classes, lectures on nutrition, gardening in schools, and the
promotion of local food. Many municipalities have recently hired
nutritionists (Cabinet Office 2010: 20). They often co-operate with
local civic groups and neighbourhood associations.
Because of the economic difficulties in many rural areas (Kitano,
2009), the promotion of domestic food, respectively local food,
is of utmost importance for local economies. Therefore, one of
the objectives of the many local plans for the promotion of food
pedagogies is the promotion of local food by, for example, increasing
the use of local produce in school lunches (Arita-chō, 2008). One
nutritionist from Kyūshū states that she thinks domestic foods are
probably safer than imported foods (Interview Ms. A., 2012). Another
nutritionist from Kyūshū believes that local food is best for the locals’
health, because it is fresh. This, combined with aspects of shipment,
Cornelia Reiher 519
costs, and local revitalisation were many good reasons to buy local
farm products, because everyone would profit (Interview Ms. H.,
2012).
Producers
Having provided a summary of the municipalities’ response to the
Basic Law, I now turn to producers. The Law on Food Pedagogies
calls on farmers, fishermen, and the food processing industry to
‘offer opportunities for people to experience a variety of farming- ,
fishery- and forestry- related activities. This is, in order to enhance
their understanding of nature’s benefits and the importance of
human activities in food production and distribution’ (MAFF 2006:
4). Policy makers in Tōkyō expect farmers to co-operate with schools
and municipalities. They expect farmers to increase the direct selling
(chisan chishō) of their products to enhance communication with
their customers. The Law expects them to cater to local schools, and
invite children and customers to offer them agricultural experiences.
The direct selling of local produce is expected to boost the Japanese
self-sufficiency rate and to assist local farmers (Hirata-Kimura &
Nishiyama, 2007).
Nonetheless, agricultural experience (nōgyō taiken) is nothing new
(Shimomura, 2007). Particularly in rural areas, farmers have always
offered opportunities for agricultural experience to people who
wanted to help during the rice-harvest, for example. In the 1970s and
1980s, it was quite common that municipalities from the Tōkyō area
would choose rural partner communities to where they would send
municipal employees and school children for agricultural experience
and recreation in nature (Kitano, 2009). Today, farmers provide
all kinds of agricultural activities. In Arita, a small municipality in
Northern Kyūshū, local farmers let fields to people from urban areas
where they can grow their own vegetables. However, since the city
dwellers only visit occasionally, a large part of the work remains with
the farmers:
They basically come to plant the crops and then to harvest.
Meanwhile, me and my wife, we water the plants and care for
it. Personally, I don’t think that they learn much about farming
through this. But they are proud of the vegetables they eventually
bring home and I earn a little (extra) money. (Interview Mr. S.,
2012)
Many farmers have also started to sell their produce directly to
customers. But this does not necessarily have the pedagogic impact
that customers learn more about crop growing or food safety.
Especially when it comes to food safety, the average farmers, who
are not involved in organic farming, do not reflect too much on
agricultural pesticides (Interviews Mr. S., Mr. O., Mr. U., 2012).
In the same manner, Japanese farmers sell directly to locals for
different reasons, but there is little evidence so far that it is because
they care about or have even heard of shokuiku. One older farmer
from Saga prefecture who lives by himself considers moving around
town with his truck and selling vegetables to housewives a chance to
meet people, and, as he smilingly said, young women in particular
(Interview Mr. O., 2012). Thus, farmers are involved in shokuiku
activities sometimes on request by local authorities and schools,
sometimes by local JA, and sometimes on their own initiative.
However, most of the farmers I have interviewed in Saga prefecture
and the Tōhoku area in 2012 have not even heard of the term
shokuiku. Younger farmers, however, such as one organic farmer
I visited in Chiba prefecture, communicate with customers and a
wider public via the internet: they write blogs about organic farming
and make movies they publish on YouTube and other channels. As
they need to attract customers, they promote their own/domestic
agricultural products as safe and delicious.
Cornelia Reiher 521
Consumer co-operatives
In this final section I look at the role of consumer co-operatives.
Japan has one of the largest and most influential consumer
co-operative networks in the world. In the 1970s, consumer
co-operatives were founded in Japan to provide consumers with
cheaper and safe milk. By collectively ordering food, housewives in
the same neighbourhood not only saved money, but the different
local community groups also developed close relationships with local
and regional farmers (Gelb & Estevez-Abe 1998: 265). During the
1970s and 1980s, with a large number of more than several 100,000
members, consumer co-operatives contributed to the spread of
awareness of food safety issues among Japanese consumers. At this
time, safe food basically meant the production of domestic food
and the use of only little pesticides or none at all. Some consumer
co-operatives exclusively contracted with producers to ensure that
these ecological standards for safe food were followed. Brand name
products were established to publicise that those products were
guaranteed to have been locally and organically grown (Jussaume et
al., 2001). Seikatsu Kurabu, for example, is a retail co-op that today
caters to 350,000 households in many parts of Japan. The co-op
offers low-pesticide, additive-free, non-genetically-modified food.
Customers of consumer co-operatives are mostly health-conscious
and ecologically minded, and order food from catalogues every week
(Interview, Seikatsu Kurabu, 2012). During the 1970s, especially
young mothers joined the co-operatives, and the local groups already
offered on a regular basis what is now called ‘agricultural experience’
by the shokuiku kihonhō (Interview, Esukōpu Ōsaka, 2012). Since
many of the consumer co-operatives advocate the idea that building
a long-term relationship with domestic farmers ensures food safety,
families often spend weekends at farms and help with farm work.
By doing so, they are promoting what the shokuiku kihonhō calls
‘understanding of […] the importance of human activities in food
production’ (MAFF, 2006).
These co-operatives also do other important pedagogical work on
food issues. For example, many local consumer groups and consumer
co-operatives today are members of the national Seikyō-Network,
which organises meetings, spreads information, and supports
financially weak groups. Besides organising trips to the country side
in order to get in touch with farmers and to help them, local groups
also offer cooking classes and lectures (Interview, Hiromerukai,
Kobe, 2012). However, the content of the lectures goes beyond
mere nutritional issues, as is the case with most municipal shokuiku
activities, and further addresses food safety issues, such as genetically
modified organisms, food labelling, or the global agri-food system.
Moreover, most of the groups are politically active and try to lobby
bureaucracy and political parties (Interview, Esukōpu Ōsaka, 2012).
While some groups write protest letters to government officials and
organise or participate in demonstrations, members of the so-called
seikatsusha networks that arose from the Seikyō network successfully
run for local council elections in urban areas (Tsubogo, 2010).
In a nutshell, consumer co-operatives not only fulfil the requirements
by the Basic Law to provide an understanding about food by offering
agricultural experience and cooking classes, but exceed the Basic
Law’s objectives with activities attempting to change the existing food
system and food legislation. However, the assumption of domestic
food being better, although not necessarily safer than imported food,
is shared by most consumer co-operatives alike.
Challenges to food pedagogies in Post-Fukushima Japan
In this section, I will elaborate on how the Japanese state failed so
far to provide adequate knowledge on irradiated food to Japanese
consumers, although, according to the Basic Law, citizens are
required to acquire ‘knowledge about food and of the ability to make
appropriate food choices’. I will show how other actors replace the
state as food pedagogue in this critical situation.
Cornelia Reiher 523
Today, many consumers are dissatisfied with the information on
irradiated foods and insufficient testing. Although the government
assures consumers that only food below the safety limit is sold, there
exists no obligation to sufficiently label foods with information on
radiation. Since monitoring by municipalities, prefectures and staterun facilities is insufficient, producers, consumers and retailers take
the initiative and undertake their own measuring. Municipalities
often lack the money to buy measuring devices, as they depend
on state subsidies to implement a sufficient measuring system
for food (Nakamura & Koizumi, 2011). At the same time, as the
aforementioned quote from the Saga Shinbun illustrates, they try to
support local farmers and are expected to do so, even at the expense
of consumers.
Especially in Fukushima prefecture and in the Tōkyō area, Civil
Radioactivity Monitoring Stations (shimin hōshanō sokuteisho) were
founded. For a small fee, consumers and producers can bring in
foodstuff and let them get measured. The results of the monitoring
are published on the internet (CRMS, 2012). Some co-ops such as
Daichi o mamorukai have established their own safety standards and
offer an extensive monitoring system (Daichi o mamorukai, 2012b).
According to MAFF, alternative safety standards are confusing
consumers. MAFF calls on food producers and retailers to stick with
the official limits and to abandon their own standards (Asahi Shinbun
online, 21 April, 2012). As this appeal by MAFF illustrates, the
Japanese government is afraid of losing the power to define what safe
food is. This indicates that after the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe,
the power relations between the state, consumer co-operatives,
producers and retailers are contested.
Since consumer co-ops principally have a very close relationship to
their contracting producers, it has become very difficult for them to
provide information on irradiated food. On the one hand they do not
want to sell irradiated food to their health-conscious customers; on
the other they want to support the producers in the Fukushima area.
In the case of Daichi o mamorukai, this dilemma has resulted in the
paradox situation that they sell vegetable sets for children which do
not contain food from Northern Japan, but at the same time also sell
“Support Tōhoku sets” (Tōhoku fukkō ōen setto) with food from the
disaster-stricken areas (Daichi o mamorukai, 2012a). Especially in
Tōkyō, many shops and stalls offer farm products from Tōhoku. Their
initiators argue that it is their patriotic duty to support the farmers
in Fukushima. However, in Fukushima prefecture and Tōkyō, other
groups, mostly initiated by parents, have installed shops where only
food products from Western Japan are sold (Fackler, 2012).
As shown above, the problem of irradiated food is not limited to
the prefectures close to the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Since
processed foods are sold in the whole country, it was no surprise
when in December 2011 irradiated infant milk powder was discovered
in Japanese supermarkets all over the country (Interview Mr. K.,
2012). Therefore, consumers not only in Tōkyō and Northern Japan
are concerned with food safety now. Some nutritionists in charge of
shokuiku in the municipalities report that in the first months after the
nuclear disaster, many consumers called for information on which
kinds of food were safe to eat and to feed to their children. Some
prefectures started research on the topic and provided municipalities
with information or invited them to lectures. One nutritionist from
Kyūshū stated:
It is difficult, because in my position I am not allowed to tell
people ‘don’t eat irradiated food’. I feel that it is the task of each
individual to take care of his or her own health and to cultivate
skills to make judgments about it. I am expected to tell people:
‘please try to increase the knowledge you need to protect yourself
on your own’. […] Since they are on their own, they need to
understand that they must not be indifferent about what they
are eating. They must think about nutrition, but also about food
safety. That is of utmost importance. (Interview Ms. H. 2012).
Cornelia Reiher 525
This quote shows that, while shokuiku in the municipalities is usually
exerted in accordance with national shokuiku policies, not all local
officials in charge of shokuiku agree with the national handling of
food safety issues after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Some call
for lower safety limits on radioactivity in food, demand food labels
that give information on radioactivity in food, and call for more
information on the topic in general. This situation not only raises
grave concerns about what constitutes food pedagogies at this
moment in Japan, but also expresses the ambivalence of the power
relations between the policy makers at the national level and the
actual pedagogues – nutritionists – at the local level who cannot
speak freely about how irradiated food poses risks to consumer’s
health.
Conclusions
Through the implementation of the Basic Law on Food Pedagogies,
the Japanese government attempted to react to challenges in the
realm of food and nutrition. In order to boost the food self-sufficiency
rate, the law promotes that domestic produce is safer, better for the
health of Japanese citizens, and to be preferred to imported foods.
Nutritionists employed at the municipalities teach children and
mothers about ‘balanced’ Japanese-style meals and how to cook local
food. Municipalities often cooperate with local farmers who sell local
food to local consumers and tourists, and invite urban consumers
to their farms to experience Japanese agriculture. Some consumer
co-ops who are closely related to their suppliers also stress the fact
that (organic) farm products from domestic farmers are safer than
imported foods. There exists a discursive interconnectedness between
the low food self-sufficiency rate and threats to food safety through
imported foods, which is also evident in the legislature, and through
activities concerning shokuiku. The dependence on imported foods
and the threats they pose to food safety are often considered far more
dangerous than the dangers irradiated foods pose to public health
(Otake, 2011).
With its focus on nutrition, cooking and gratefulness towards
domestic food producers, shokuiku in Japan, as practiced
according to the Basic Law by municipalities, schools, and national
organisations, is not an adequate concept to deal with the problems
Japanese consumers face after the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima.
This rather proves the opposite to be true: with the law’s emphasis on
domestic food and the proliferation of the assumption that Japanese
food is safer than imported food, it further endangers the health of
the Japanese citizens. However, the preferential treatment of (food)
producers is not surprising when taking into account the post-war
history of consumer politics (MacLachlan, 2002) and the handling of
food poisoning caused by environmental pollution by the industry.
Victims of the 1950s mercury poisoning in Minamata, for example,
still fight law suits against Chisso, whose chemical plant in Kumamoto
prefecture released its sewage into the sea and contaminated the fish
population in the surrounding waters (George, 2012).
Consequently, many established food education practitioners still
have not changed their assumption of ‘domestic food = healthy and
safe food’ after the Fukushima nuclear accident. However, food
education faces a huge challenge due to this situation, because the
ignorance regarding food safety issues from official sides leaves
Japanese consumers with a lack of awareness for these issues.
Therefore, the Japanese state is not an appropriate provider of
adequate knowledge on food safety. Instead, stakeholders who are
not included in the state’s shokuiku campaign, such as consumer
co-ops, try to provide their members with information on radiation
in food. Most interestingly perhaps is the appearance of new actors
in the field of food pedagogies, such as the Civil Radioactivity
Measurement Stations that try to truly achieve the objective of the
shokuiku kihonhō: ‘the acquisition of knowledge about food’ and its
Cornelia Reiher 527
dissemination to enable Japanese consumers ‘to make appropriate
food choices’ (Naikakufu, 2005).
As I have shown in the beginning of this essay, food safety has always
been a subordinate aspect of Japanese government’s food pedagogies.
However, one would have expected policy makers to change their
focus more towards the issue of irradiated food after the nuclear
catastrophe. But as the Shokuiku White Paper from 2012 (Naikakufu,
2012) makes clear, this is not the case. The emergence of other,
mostly community-based and civic, stakeholders shows that there is
a need for this kind of food pedagogies among Japanese consumers.
Therefore, in these times of crisis it is of utmost importance to further
challenge and complement the Japanese state’s approach to shokuiku.
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Cornelia Reiher 531
About the author
Cornelia Reiher is a Lecturer in the Institute of Political Science
and Japanese Studies at Halle University, Germany. Her research
focuses on globalization, food politics and identities and Japan.
Cornelia received her PhD from Leipzig University in 2012 for a
thesis about ‘Discourses on local identity in rural Japan. Arita’s
ceramic industry in global contexts’. She has published articles about
food education, municipal amalgamations, rural tourism and local
identity in Japan.
Contact details
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Philosophische
Fakultät I, Institut für Politikwissenschaft und Japanologie, Hoher
Weg 4, 06120 Halle, Germany.
Email: cornelia.reiher@japanologie.uni-halle.de
Pedagogies of doing good: Problematisations,
authorities, technologies and teleologies in food
activism
University of Technology, Sydney
In this paper, we apply a framework from Nikolas Rose to analyse
the politics of ‘doing good’ in food activist education, what we call
food pedagogies. We argue that a detailed exploration of food
pedagogies has been neglected in adult education and in the growing
field of food studies, in spite of the rapidly proliferating forms and
site of food education, advice and learning in Australia and other
countries. In contrast to other frameworks in adult education
which focus on classifying approaches as behaviourist, humanist,
progressive and radical, we deploy problematisations, technologies,
authorities and teleologies. These latter ‘pathways’ move away
from an abstract idea of ‘power as property’ and as coercive (Gore
1993) to an examination of ‘power as technique’ and as productive.
Drawing on qualitative data with three different types of food
activist educators – a biodynamic educator, a health promotion
managers and two farmer-activists, we show Rose’s framework
Rick Flowers and Elaine Swan 533
opens up our ideas about what can be seen as pedagogical to include
the non-human and how adult educators authorise their claims to be
doing good. We conclude by arguing that the differences in how each
of these activists see food and health should not simply be seen as a
difference in opinion but a difference in what Annemarie Mol (1999)
calls ontological politics. In so doing, the paper contributes new
findings and theorising on pedagogies to food studies, and a new
analytic framework for analysing adult education approaches and
in particular their claims to be ‘doing good.’
The politics of knowledge and relations between teachers and
learners are foundational concerns of adult education scholars
(Foley 2000; Cervero & Wilson 2000; Alfred 2001; Vella 1994). In
critical food reform, the racialised, classed and gendered moralities
of food knowledge are foundational concerns (Guthman 2004, 2008;
Slocum 2011; Kimura 2011; Ken 2010; Lupton 1998). In this paper,
we analyse how these intersect in food activist pedagogies, itself an
under-researched topic in adult learning and food studies as we have
argued elsewhere (Flowers and Swan 2011; see also Cook 2009).
Drawing on a Foucauldian framework culled from British sociologist
Nikolas Rose (1996), we analyse the accounts of three types of food
activists: a bio-dynamic agricultural educator, a health educator, and
two farmer-activists, taken from a full-day roundtable we convened
for food activists involved in educational work for ethical and
sustainable food.
We have two main aims: first, to offer an analysis of the project of
‘doing good’ in food pedagogies through using Rose’s framework.
By doing good, we mean the ways in which educators – and in this
case food activist educators – authorise what they do as a form of
ethics; and secondly, to compare the framework to typologies of
adult education which describe politics of knowledge and relations
between teachers and learners (Merriam, Cafferella & Baumgartner
534 Pedagogies of doing good
2007; Newman 1993, 2006; Fenwick 2006; Boud & Griffin 1987).
In focusing on ‘doing good’, we intend to examine the ways in which
food educators legitimate their interventions, and the politics of
these claims (see Guthman 2008 on how white undergraduate
students try to do good by ‘bringing good food to others’). This is an
important topic for food studies’ authors who question the morality
in food advice but up until now have focused less on pedagogies per
se (Mol 2010; Jackson 2009; Coveney, this issue; Pike and Leahy,
this issue). In the paper we argue that Rose’s framework is a fruitful
form of analysis for educators as it opens up the vista of what can be
understood as pedagogical; expands our understanding of the types
of knowledge that adult educators mobilise in their work; and finally,
offers a way to examine the politics of ‘doing good.’
Of course, the work of Michel Foucault has been used extensively
in analysing adult education in the past twenty years (Fejes &
Nicholl 2007; Fejes 2008; Garrick & Solomon 2001; Reich 2008;
Chappell, Rhodes, Solomon, Tennant & Yates 2003; McLean 2012;
Tennant 1998; English 2006; Swan 2009, 2008; Gore 1993). As
adult education theorist, Scott McLean (2012) writes, Nikolas Rose’s
research is less recognised and deployed in adult education, in spite
of having influenced a number of related fields. Both Foucault and
Rose offer adult educators a conceptualisation of the operation of
power, quite distinct from Gramsci and Marx and other theories of
power used in some forms of adult education literature. It is distinct
on a number of counts. First, implicit in some typologies of adult
education (see table 1) is a construction of power as a possession, a
see-saw model in which teachers have it or learners have it. This leads
adult educators to emphasise how power should be distributed to
learners, a concept of ‘power-as-property’ (Gore 1993: 73; Chappell et
al. 2003). But for Foucault and Rose, power is exercised rather than
owned. This means:
‘that power is not the possession of some people who wield it over
others dominating and constraining them but that it is relational
and productive. Without power, nothing is achieved. But if power
is not to be found in somebody’s hands, or in this or that social
actor’s possession, then what is it and how does it manifest itself
(Fox 2000: 860)?’
Power is exercised through everyday mundane activities and
processes: what Foucault calls ‘technologies’: hybrid assemblages of
diverse forms of knowledge such as advice, techniques, judgments,
experts, texts, and sanctions. Technologies are highly concrete,
specific forms knowledge-in-practice not generalised approaches.
Through these mundane, micro, even ‘minor and petty’ forms of
expertise, authorities such as the state attempt to govern through
capacitating, not constraining us. This works in quite unsystematic,
dispersed, contradictory and localised ways across innumerable and
unexpected sites (Miller & Rose 1996: 12; Miller & Rose 2008; McNay
1992).
This reformulation of power is important for theorising adult
education. Adult education is often conceived by scholars and activists
as a site for enabling learners to liberate themselves through gaining
new knowledge or becoming conscious of existing but undervalued
forms of knowledge. But another point of distinction is that for
Foucault, there can be no separation of power and knowledge, thus
he uses the term power/knowledge. Power works through all forms of
knowledge: for example, bottom-up and top-down, scientific and lay,
and particularly for Foucault, self-knowledge (McHoul & Grace 1993).
There is no point of origin such as an institution like the state or an
elite cabal. And there is no way to be outside of power or outside of
knowledge, even so called liberatory knowledge such as consciousness
raising or self-reflection.
Thirdly, power is, in addition, not seen simply as a coercive force.
It is also productive in the sense that we can do and be things as a
result of the operation of power. Part of its productiveness is the
way it operates through notions of seduction, freedom and desire
rather than prohibition, coercion and punishment. Rose argues that,
although these latter forms of power are still in operation they are
secondary to the idea of our being governed by the idea of freedom.
Thus, he writes that ‘in striving to live our autonomous lives, to
discover who we really are, to realize our potentials and shape our
lifestyles, we become… bound in new ways into the pedagogies of
expertise (1999 cited in McLean 2012). An important part of the
operation of power then is that we imagine we are doing good to
ourselves: getting the good life of health, wealth or happiness.When
educators work with such ‘pedagogies of expertise,’ they too construct
themselves as doing good in helping people get the good life.
In this special issue, John Coveney, Jo Pike and Deanna Leahy
provide useful Foucauldian analyses of nutrition and school lunches,
respectively. Our work differs in three key ways: first, we are keen to
offer a framework which could be used to interrogate ‘doing good’
across other sites of adult education; secondly, if we accept that
pedagogies work through hybrid assemblages we are interested to
examine ways in which food activists mobilise diverse forms of advice,
techniques, judgments, experts, texts, and sanctions and what this
may mean politically. We have argued elsewhere that activists in food
social movements draw on a panoply of knowledges: codified and
informal; theoretical and experiential; lay and expert; embodied and
cognitive; gendered, racialised and classed (Flowers & Swan 2011;
see also Allen et al. 2003 for research on the place based nature of
food activism knowledges). Much of what is going on in food social
movements is:
‘struggles over knowledge systems… The most cursory look at
today’s food advertisements shows that all food is embedded in
a contested discourse of knowledge claims’ (Goodman & DuPuis
2002: 18).
As we emphasise elsewhere the politics of knowing - what is known,
who produces it and ‘who is in the know’ - are critical to food
pedagogies (Flowers and Swan 2011). This type of politics links to our
third aim which is to examine the authorisation of ‘doing good’ and
their relations to gender, race and class. Struggles over knowledge are
also struggles about the legitimacy for authority. Rose’s framework
encourages us to analyse the politics of ‘doing good’ as a form of
legitimacy. Contrary to some adult education theorists, this means we
cast a critical gaze at the claims to ‘doing good’ made by activists as
we might at the claims made by institutional experts to offer us new
ways to think about adult education and food activism. To do this
we begin with a summary of a ‘typical’ adult education approaches
framework, followed by an introduction to the work of Nikolas Rose;
we introduce Rose’s framework of problematisations, technologies,
authorities and teleologies in some detail so that this could be applied
to future adult education initiatives. After introducing the three types
of food activist educator, we relate each of the elements of Rose’s
framework to illustrate quotes and themes from the activists and we
conclude by asking what this means for understanding the ethics and
politics of doing good.
Frameworks
In this section, we compare an influential typology from Griff Foley’s
edited book Understanding adult education and training (2000) to
an alternative framework from Nikolas Rose’s work. Adult education
scholars such as Sharran Merriam, Rosemary Cafferella & Lisa
Baumgartner (2007), David Boud (1987), Tara Fenwick (2006),
Miriam Zukas and Janice Malcolm (2002), and Griff Foley (2000)
have created all typologies of different traditions, orientations,
identities and philosophies in adult education theory and practices.
These authors describe such classification attempts as limited and
simplifying but argue that they have heuristic utility in enabling adult
educators to understand different theoretical and value positions
within particular traditions (Foley 2000). Underpinning most of
these is a classic distinction between traditions labelled liberal,
behaviourist, humanist and radical. Foley’s typology, abridged
below in Table 1 is a useful example for this paper as it is widely
used; has a long lineage (Scott 1985 which in turn is adapted from
Darkenwald and Merriam 1982); and is taught on undergraduate and
postgraduate courses.
Table 1
School of
thought
Aims of adult
education
Role of teacher
and learner
Teaching
methods
Cultivation of the
intellect (traditional
school)
Fill learners
with worthwhile
knowledge
Teacher is in control
and learner is
passive
Mainly lecture
Individual selfactualisation
(humanist)
Self-direction
and selffulfilment
Teacher facilitates
and students decide
what to learn
Experiential
methods
Progressives
(reformist)
Active individual
citizenship
to strengthen
democracy
Teacher and student
learn from each
other
Problem solving
and negotiated
learning
Social
transformation
(revolutionary)
Create new
social and
political order
Co-creation of
curriculum
Participatory
action research
and dialogical
learning
Organisational
effectiveness
Develop skills
and attitudes
to enable
achievement of
prescribed goals
Trainers transmit
information and
deliver prescribed
curriculum
Outcomes
are assessed
in terms of
objectives
achieved
Source: adapted from Foley 2000, in turn adapted from Scott 1985 and
Darkenwald & Merriam 1982: 14-15.
We could attempt to categorise various food-activists according
to these schools of thought. But for us this forecloses analysis. For
example, implicit in many of these frameworks, including Foley’s,
is a foundational continuum of behaviourism bad; humanist so-so
and progressive good. From this stems a number of effects which
in our view limit examinations of adult education: first, some fairly
crude assumptions about the power of the teacher and student.
Second, a failure to examine the claims to ‘doing good’ across all
schools of thought especially the so-called radical or progressive.
Thirdly, this kind of table already assumes that the kinds of ideas
which are informing practice are from a shallow educational pool of
behaviourism, humanism and critical theory rather than the deeper
and swirling eddies of knowledges used by food activists. It delineates
education as if pedagogies and their supposed schools of thought
are hermetically sealed and not informed by other cultural ideas.
Fourthly, in assuming what already constitutes the educative, it is less
useful for identifying and examining more ‘concealed’ pedagogies.
In contrast, Rose’s framework enables us to extend our net more
widely. The pros and cons of Foucauldian approaches have been
much debated across a number of fields, and in particular by
feminists (Luke and Gore 1992; McNay 1992; Gore 1993). For
proponents - including Stephen Brookfield (2005) in his book about
critical theory and adult education - Foucault’s model of power as
productive is particularly useful. Thus, the relations between people
and social institutions are not simply coercive, but take on many
aims, ‘not just to control, subdue, discipline, normalise, or reform’
but also to make us ‘more intelligent, wise, happy, virtuous, healthy,
productive, docile, enterprising, fulfilled, self-esteeming, empowered’
(Rose 1996: 12). This means for Rose that we are not ‘incessantly
dominated, repressed, or colonised by power (although, of course,
domination and repression play their part in particular practices and
sectors) but subjectified, educated and solicited’ (1996: 79). How
then might we examine techniques of subjectification, education and
solicitation in food pedagogies?
Rose’s framework provides us with a ‘shorthand’ for such an approach
to analysing power and pedagogy. First referenced briefly in a paper
in one of the key journals for Foucauldian scholars, Economy and
Society (1993), and then in a more extended discussion published in
the book, Inventing our selves: Psychology, power and personhood
(1996), Rose positions the framework as a set of ‘pathways’ for
investigating the history of how we relate to ourselves (1996: 25). The
set of pathways comprises what he refers to as ‘problematizations’,
‘authorities’, ‘technologies’ and ‘teleologies’. We can contrast these to
the categories in Foley’s table to analyse adult education approaches
and we compare these more extensively later in the paper.
Table 2
Traditional categories from
Foley
Pathways derived from Rose
school of thought
problematisation
teaching methods
technologies
role of teacher and learner
authorities
aims
teleologies
Usefully for adult education, Rose is keen to map the concrete
vocabularies, techniques and practices professionals and lay people
use. Rose, himself, uses the framework to offer a capacious set of
questions to examine ‘psy’ pedagogies (coaching, facilitation, selfhelp) but we suggest in this paper that it can used for analysing
other educational projects such as food pedagogies. We now define,
elaborate and apply each ‘pathway’ in turn to the accounts of three
types of food activists.
Problematisations
We start with the idea of ‘problematisations’ because this concept
is fundamental to Foucauldian theorising. The comparison point in
adult education literature such as Foley would be ‘schools of thought’:
behaviourism, humanist, progressive and radical. Through applying
the concept of problematisations to three types of food activist
educators, we want to identify how we might think differently about
‘schools of thought’. Although our paper is mainly focused on Rose
and Foucault, we augment their definition of problematisation with
Carole Bacchi as she has developed a body of work extending the
notion of problematisation to policy making (2012, 2010).
First then, Foucault defines problematisation as ‘how and why certain
things (behaviour, phenomena, processes) become a problem (1985:
115). The significance of this concept is in its focus on the processual:
‘asking how this rendering of things problematic occurred. The
term problematizing [is] a useful way of designating this as a
process, for it remove[s] the self-evidence of the term ‘problems.’
It suggest[s] that ‘problems’ are not pre-given, lying there waiting
to be revealed. They have to be constructed and made visible,
and this construction of a field of problems is a complex and slow
process’ (Miller & Rose 2008: 14).
For example, a problem for some activists is that people are not
eating enough organic food. But a problematisation is more than
just seeing a problem: it is about how a particular group of activists,
in this case, make suppositions and presumptions about what food
is ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ based on certain kinds of knowledges, and how
these get translated into advice, prescriptions, tips, techniques and
interventions. Problematisation is about analysing the conditions
of knowledge production: ‘Where, how and by whom are aspects of
the human being rendered problematic according to what systems of
judgement and in relation to what concerns’ (Rose 1996: 25)? This
means analysing ‘how problems are given a shape through the ways
they are spoken about and through the ‘knowledges’ that are assumed
in their shaping’ (Bacchi 2010: 2). For example, of the ‘problem’ of
madness, Foucault asks ‘how and why were very different things in
the world gathered together, characterized, analyzed, and treated as
for example ‘mental illness’?’ The answer to this question provides
the “elements” deemed relevant “for a given ‘problematisation’”
(Foucault, 1985 cited Bacchi 2012: 2). What is emphasised here is that
problematisation involves a gathering together of knowledges and so
in relation to food activism we can ask what is gathered by whom for
what ends?
A second part of problematisation is designating certain people and
behaviours as unsound and then trying to change them. In relation to
food, certain types of eating are constructed variously as unhealthy;
environmentally damaging; cruel to animals; unsustainable for food
producers; and having unfair labour conditions for workers. Groups
of people are seen to be in need of changing, depending on which of
these problems is the target of reform: women, mothers, children,
working classes, middle classes, young men, racially minoritised
groups, migrants etc. Experts are needed to identify the problem
and to provide the solutions including changing people’s behaviours:
for example, adult educators. People who need changing ‘have to
be known to be governed’ (Bacchi 2012: 5). Thus, the eating of,
growing of, wasting of, shopping for and cooking food constitutes
a constellation of problematisations for a range of experts and
professionals that include agricultural economists, statisticians,
nutritionists, development planners, adult educators and health
promotion workers. Problematisations produce problematic people,
habits and objects and people who know, people who don’t (Flowers
& Swan 2011).
Finally, problematisations entail particular solutions. Environmental
issues about food, for some activists, might mean buying local food.
Or it might mean buying organic food that isn’t local. Solutions are
grounded in certain presuppositions too. So buying ‘local’ food grown
in a 100-mile radius is based on an assumption that reducing the
distance food travels prevents certain environmental problems.
Solutions can be provided in the form of advice, rules, opinions,
policies, and prescriptive texts (Bacchi 2012). We can see this clearly
in relation to food pedagogies with magazine columns, calorie
counting, nutritional labels, recipe cards, healthy eating mnemonics
etc. Through the process of problematisation, experts and solutions
create subject positions, certain identities - ways of being and acting
- and as a result, moralities and ethics about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people,
behaviours and objects.
Having elaborated on the pathway of ‘problematisation’, we analyse
the accounts of three types of food educators from our research. We
provide a brief summary of their key concerns about food pedagogies
drawn from our coding of core themes in their accounts. Before doing
that, we provide a short introduction to the activists.
The food activist educators
The data are drawn from a full-day roundtable discussion we
organised for a number of food activist educators. For the purposes
of our paper, we focus on Ian, Susan, Joan and Paul because they
provide us with sufficient depth and heterogeneity in order to
exemplify Rose’s framework.
Ian is a self-employed bio-dynamics agricultural educator who runs
workshops in Australia and internationally on growing foods. Biodynamics is based on the philosophy of Rudolph Steiner, which
includes a belief that the visible, physical world is penetrated by a
world of life-forces (Purdue 2000).
Susan is manager of a health promotion project aimed at encouraging
‘disadvantaged people’ to eat according to the principles of the
Australian Guide to Healthy Eating which were produced by the
Commonwealth of Australia (Kellet, Smith & Schmerlaib 1998). The
initiative is based on a peer education model in which local people are
trained to teach cooking, healthy eating and budgeting.
Joan and Paul are farmers and advocates in a farmer’s association.
They have a particular interest in promoting provenance. All of the
educators have a clear idea of the strategies they think will make a
‘difference.’ In the next section, we use quotes from our five-hour
audio recorded discussions illustratively to enable us to elucidate
Rose’s framework and to signpost further potential analysis. Our aim
is to not deride or dismiss the work of the activists but attend to the
ideas and techniques they drew upon and to ask questions about their
likely effects.
Summary of problematisation for each educator
The problematisation for Ian, the biodynamic farmer-educator is
that foods are not being grown with the life-force of the cosmos
in mind (Pfeiffer 1938; Purdue 2000). This means that people are
eating foods that can make them sick physically and spiritually.
Thus the land and the soil are seen as sites of action. Small-scale,
commercial and not-for-profit vegetable growers and farmers are
the target learners who need to change. The system of judgment
is biodynamic philosophy. The solution is to show people who
might grow food as farmers and gardeners how to use biodynamic
principles.
The problematisation for Susan the health educator, is that
poor, working class and migrant mothers are not cooking food
according to the ‘healthy eating messages’ promulgated by
government authorities (Kellet, Smith & Schmerlaib 1998). In
this problematisation, the health worker imagines this group does
not know what healthy food is or how to cook it on a tight budget.
She says: ‘people have very little money to buy their food because
they are all probably on government benefits or have very small
incomes.’ The system of judgement relates to nutritional science
and government policy on what constitutes health but also popular
ideas about good mothering. There are also judgments made about
how this group best learns, namely from their peers. The solution
is to teach mothers how to cook and shop according to the ‘healthy
eating messages’ agenda. She says: ‘So one of the things that we are
trying to teach these participants and peer educators is how to cook
a healthy meal with a modest budget.’
The problematisation for Joan and Paul, the farmer-activists is that
consumers are not purchasing enough ‘local’ food from small-scale
farmers and this means they are buying the wrong kind of food
which, in turn affects farmers’ livelihoods and people’s health. It is
believed that consumers don’t know where food comes from and if
they did, they could make rational decisions to buy more local food
that would have better nutritional properties. The site of intervention
is supermarket aisles. The solution is to ensure food is labelled with
information about provenance, nutritional and ‘freshness’ qualities.
The system of judgement is a mix of social marketing, environmental
ideas about locavorism and again nutritional science. Joan says:
‘In supermarkets, information on the origin, freshness, or mode of generation is
scarcely available. That’s particularly evident in the food aisles in the fish market
aisles because even though you might be buying Australian fish, you cannot
differentiate between farm fish and free ranging fish in which your omega threes
are substantially different. In farmed fish, the omega six is much more relevant and
the omega threes are down, yet it’s the omega threes that we are looking for in our
diet. There have attempts to increase the disclosure by the supermarkets. But the
supermarkets, their accumulators and merchants have actively opposed any attempts
at transparency in the area of production, mode, origin, or date of harvest.’
Across all these problematisations are assumptions about what
makes for ‘good health’ and individual’s responsibility for growing,
shopping, cooking and eating in ways which are imagined to be
‘healthful.’ Although Rose’s work typically lacks attention to class,
race and gender, we can see classed expertise in operation here
and assumptions about the class and gender of those people who
can and should learn different habits. Growing food requires land.
Making decisions based on food provenance requires a certain level of
disposable income and classed attitudes about health.
There are clear distinctions in who is seen as responsible for
producing health, and what the solutions and the sites of intervention
are. For example, in the case of the health educators, migrant and
working class women are being responsibilised for their children’s
health: they are being taught how to ‘mother health.’ Food is seen as a
kind of medicine (Gaynor 1998). But there are different assumptions
being made about what constitutes ‘good-for-you-food’ and what it
‘contains’ which can facilitate health. For the biodynamic agricultural
educator, food is a conduit for a life force from the cosmos. For the
farmers, it is freshness and locality which in their view guarantees the
vitality giving properties of food.
Underpinning these pedagogies are different ontologies of food and of
physical health. But the assumption that food is only important for its
role in promoting physical health is, of course, highly contested. For
example, Lauren Berlant (2010) argues that the emphasis on physical
health in relation to food neglects how important certain kinds of food
are for mental and emotional health.
To turn now to reflect on adult education typologies: the use of
problematisation can be compared to schools of thought. Schools
of thought seem like static and predictable influences on how adult
educators think and act. The benefit of using problematisation is to
make ‘thinking as practice’ more visible and to show that there is
nothing inevitable about it (Bacchi 2012). It gets at the processes and
conditions of knowledge-making and forces us to examine takenfor-granted assumptions about what are imagined to be ‘problem’
actions, behaviours and people in a way that schools of thought do
not. Food activists and adult educators draw on a spectrum of ideas
from the predictable to the unpredictable in quite particular ‘blends’
which can’t fit simply into the cookie cutter of behaviouralism,
humanism, progressive and radical (Csurgo, Kovach & Kucerova
2008; Swan 2009). Problematisation can help us trace blends, and
their effects. To put it pithily, schools of thought focus on product and
homogeneity, and problematisation on process and hybridity.
Technologies
Technology in the Foucauldian sense refers to various means
‘invented to govern the human being, to shape or fashion conduct
in desired directions’ (Rose 1996:26). In Foley’s adult education
table, technologies can be compared to teaching methods such as
lectures, group discussions, and peer education. Implicit in the
classifying of teaching methods are assumptions that some are more
‘empowering’ than others. Technologies as defined by Foucauldians
are much broader in scope than teaching methods. Technologies
are assemblages of knowledges, instruments, statistics, notations,
systems of judgment, buildings and persons and can take numerical,
classificatory, spatial, visual, bodily and discursive forms (Ilcan and
Phillips 2003). Extending what we might see as pedagogical, the
emphasis is on the mundane, technical and material (Dean 1999).
A distinctive element to technologies compared to teaching methods
is that they bring to view more indirect and everyday ways through
which people intervene in their own ways of acting, being and living
and which connect back up to political strategies. As assemblages
of situated, technical and corporeal procedures, practices and
tactics, they are how government works at a distance (Miller &
Rose 2008: 16). Importantly, these technologies work through the
notion of freeing rather than coercing or dominating us. This freeing
constitutes a new form of control which values self-responsibility,
self-care and self-discipline as ethical and civic.
The idea of technologies has been taken up with some alacrity by
a range of adult education theorists, but few have deployed Rose’s
other pathways of problematisation, authorities and teleologies.
Foucault defined different types of technologies which work together:
technologies of production, sign systems, power and the self. Each
of these technologies embodies distinct ‘presuppositions and
objectives about human beings’ (Rose 1996: 26) and distinct forms of
domination that involves changing or training the self (Burkitt 2002;
Besley 2005). Adult educators have focused most on technologies of
the self (see for example, Fejes 2008; Reich 2008; Chappell, Rhodes,
Solomon, Tenannt & Yates 2003). In essence, these are mechanisms
for self-discipline: procedures which ‘permit individuals to effect
by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of
operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and
way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a
certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’
(Foucault 1988: 18). Comprised of specialised forms of knowledge
which teach us how ‘to estimate, to calculate, to evaluate, to discipline
and to judge ourselves’ (Cruikshank 1993: 329), technologies of
the self are contrasted with technologies of power: the latter being
exercised by institutions such as prisons and schools and which
attempt to dominate through examining, normalising and classifying.
Examples of adult education scholarship on technologies of the self
include Clive Chappell et al.’s analysis of self-help books, work-based
learning, training in corporate culture, and HIV/AIDS education
(2003); Andreas Fejes on ‘the confession’ in educational guidance
(2008); Ann Reich’s analysis of Australian vocational education and
training (2008); and in relation to food pedagogy, Peter Kelly and Lyn
Harrison’s analysis (2009) of Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen apprenticeship
project.
Technologies of the self have also been discussed extensively in
relation to research on food. For example, Cressida Heyes (2007)
discusses how organised diet programmes and weigh-ins are
presented as technologies of the self in Weightwatchers. In this issue,
Pike and Leahy write about the technology of the school lunchbox and
how it operates to produce a morality about good mothering. There
has been in-depth work on technologies of the self in community
development by Barbara Cruikshank (1993). She argues that
empowerment and self-esteem can be understood as technologies.
Any technology, she reminds us, operates at improving the individual
and society. Importantly for Foucault both technologies of power
and technologies of the self produce effects that constitute the self.
Feminists and critical race theorists have gone onto argue that these
also constitute gender, race and class.
Summary of technology for each educator
We focus on two central technologies for Ian, the biodynamics
educator: one is a soil activator made from a mixture of chicken
manure, basalt salt and other ingredients. In biodynamic circles,
it is imagined to carry cosmological properties. In his teaching, he
hands this out for people to try. It has material properties in terms
of its biological capacities to affect soil and operates symbolically as
‘dirt’ operates in the organic food movement as a signifier of purity
and nature. Together it works as a ‘graspable ethics’ i.e. that you can
touch and smell (Clarke, Cloke, Barnet & Malpass 2008).
The second is the technology of hands-on learning: learners have
to have a go, be it growing crops or baking bread. He says: ‘In other
words, I teach people about the preparations but by the time they
go home they’ve stirred them and sprayed them so they’ve had the
physical experience. So they can go home and initiate change.’‘
Having a go’ works on the body rather than the intellect, and acts as
a kind of witnessing to ‘little miracles’ which then work to convert
learners. This can take several years. His is a pedagogy of conversion
rather than didactism.
‘It’s amazing how these things happen but I’ve got little samples [of soil
activator] you can all take home to try it. … I gave [an airport security officer]
one of these little packs that you can take home and I said look, we stir it for
an hour … just make sure you dissolve it in your watering can, flick it out,
we aim for a drop per square foot, and I got on the aeroplane and left… 12
months later I went through and he was on duty. He rushed over and said; I
don’t want you to think that I didn’t believe you, but he said that stuff is just
way better than what you told me it was. So the issue is how we get people
to start. Because with farming, once people have the experience, it’s not me
teaching them, it’s actually their experience that actually drives it.’
In the case of Susan, the health promotion manager, peer education
is the core technology: ‘We decided that we would train ten peer
educators to start off as a pilot in nutrition concepts. Very basic
nutrition concepts.’ Peer education – in which it is claimed that if
‘peers’ teach and mentor it will be more effective and progressive
than if one relies on professional experts - has become a widely
used intervention in health promotion since the 1980s (Turner
& Shepherd 1998). Common assumptions are that peers are a
credible source of information, act as role models and equalise
power relations. Peerness then is used as a gloss for participatory
democracy.
The peer educators in this example, however, are institutionally
educated in ‘nutrition basics’, ‘healthy eating messages’ and
presentation skills and are given mentors in nutrition from a local
university. Their role is to run ‘healthy eating activities’ in the
community: to do cooking demonstrations; to share ideas about
nutritional values of food, and costing menus, largely aimed at
poorer migrant women. The peer educators then are trained in
nutritional knowledge that their ‘peers’ do not have. The nature of
their peerness then is their coming from the same neighbourhood.
Labelling on food is the technology for Joan and Paul, the farmeractivists. In their view, the label should provide consumers with
information about provenance, date of picking, place of production,
ingredients, and ecological footprint. They, like many other
Australian food activists, refer to this as ‘truth in labelling.’ As Paul
puts it:
‘Consumers need to be taught to read the label and require that the product
they are buying has comprehensive information… Now this is what most
people don’t realise. When you buy a packet of eggs, that could have been in
a cool room for six months prior to being packed. Same with your vegetables. When you go to Woolworths or Coles, you’ll see a date when it was packed.
But that could be a week old.’
Labelling works as a technology of the self as it assumes people
can be agentic by being informed (Yngfalk 2012). It is a means
through which consumers can protect themselves and their bodies
from harm through their everyday shopping decisions. Carl Yngfalk
(2012) observes that labelling attempts to train people to trust their
cognitive decision-making and ‘factual’ information and to over-ride
their ‘greedy bodies’ (Mol 2010) and sense of smell, touch and taste.
Even though label-knowledge will necessarily be incomplete and
food information highly contested, for the farmers the labels will
operate as truthful authorities.
Using the concept of technologies enables us to broaden our
understanding of what can be understood as pedagogical. The food
educators are using a range of human and non-human technologies,
such as Body Mass Index, healthy eating pyramid, and peer
educators. There are some similarities with the concept of hidden
curriculum which also expands the analytical focus of what could
be considered pedagogical. But hidden curriculum is based on a
particular understanding of ideology. In the words of Steph Lawler:
… the concept of ideology almost always presupposes a ‘real’
which is both beyond ideology and obscured by it (Barrett 1991).
To speak of ideology is to speak of the lies that obscure the truth,
but to speak of discourses … is to speak of the knowledges that
produce the truth… [Foucault] replaces a concern with how we
come to be governed by lies and untruth (as with ideology) with
a concern with how we come to be governed by truths which are
made true. … It is simply not possible, in many cases, to speak or
even to think “outside the true” (Lawler 2008:59).
To focus on technologies, means then to be less concerned about what
is deemed to be true or not, but how what is deemed to be true comes
about, and at a technical or material level. Thus there are no teaching
methods or technologies that are outside power/knowledge, even
that of learner or community empowerment (Cruickshank 1993; Gore
1993). So, as the feminist educational scholar Jennifer Gore observes
of the often used circle chair technique in which interactional
control is imagined to move from the teacher as learners sit together
not behind desks in rows with eyes to the front: ‘there is nothing
intrinsically liberating about this practice (1993:58). Adult educators
who might be categorised in polarised ways as radical or behaviourist
in the literature, use similar technologies of the self such as diaries
and group discussion and in so doing exercise power and knowledge.
Of course, their aims and content may be different but a particular
relation to oneself and others is produced for the learners and the
educators through deploying technologies of the self.
But the concept also asks us to reflect on the wider relays and links of
technologies to wider governmentality aims. Of course behaviourism,
humanism and progressive education have all been used in the service
of institutional and governmental goals but this is rarely discussed
in adult education models such as Foley’s. In addition, we need to
ask questions about who can mobilise what kinds of technologies. It
should not be assumed that they are available universally nor their
effects even and undifferentiated by gender, race and class (McNay
1992).
Authorities
The third dimension in the conventional adult education typology
is the roles of teachers and learners and how these may be defined
in relation to their relative skills, power, and expertise. Here we will
consider as a point of comparison, Rose’s concept of authorities.
Rose asks us to study the nature of the authority of those involved in
defining, making and solving problematisations: for example, food
activist educators. Analysing authority means to think about: ‘Who
is accorded or claims the capacity to speak truthfully about humans,
their nature, their problems?’ (Rose 1996:27). Of the recent rise in
food experts, Jane Dixon (2003) asks what they claim as their right
to act. This involves us examining how authority is authorised – for
example by the law, the media, culture, science, art and sport. The
nature of authority varies and can be personal, allied to science,
spirituality, claims to truth, or formal qualifications. For example in
relation to food, John Coveney (this issue; 2006), Jo Pike and Deana
Leahy (this issue), and Deborah Lupton (1996) write about the way
‘nutritional science’ provides authority for a range of experts such as
health workers, personal trainers, and teachers.
For example, we can ask how has it come about that Australian food
writer, Stephanie Alexander or British TV chef, Jamie Oliver are seen
as authorities on what we eat and cook at home. Rose shows us how
authority takes different forms: expert, codified and lay knowledge,
but also importantly for the purposes of this paper, includes wisdom,
virtue, experience and practical judgment. So Alexander and
Oliver call upon nutritional-science authority but also invoke their
experience as cooks and lovers of food. Adult education theorists
have long recognised experiential knowledge but Rose’s framework
pushes us to dig deeper and interrogate who and what has authorised
it. A critical dimension to authorities includes classifying people
‘behaving badly.’ In the field of food pedagogies there are energetic
pronouncements by food educators about ‘bad’ eating, cooking and
shopping behaviours motivated by a belief they are ‘doing good.’
Rose’s understanding of authority is that the idea of ‘doing good’
- being ethical and wanting to help - is central to the legitimacy of
contemporary pedagogies and educators.
For Rose, another dimension is the relation between authorities and
those who are subject to them. One commonplace relation is the
pastoral relation like that of a priest and a member of his or her flock,
in which techniques such as confession, self-disclosure, discipleship
and exemplarity (role modelling) are used. Other types of relations
which we might see in adult education and food pedagogies, which
are under-theorised, include solicitation, seduction, captivation and
in particular, conversion (Rose 1996). As Miller and Rose put it:
It seems that there are only so many ways in which the few can
change the many…you can regulate others, enmesh them in a
wed of codes and standards, coupling these with sanctions for
transgression and/or rewards for obedience. You can captivate
others, seduce them with your charms and powers, bind them
to your values through the charismatic force of your persona.
You can educate others, ‘change their minds’ as the saying goes,
train, convince or persuade them to adopt particular ways of
understanding, explaining, reasoning, evaluating, deciding,
such that they will recast what they wish to achieve through
reckoning in your terms. Or you can convert others, transform
their personhood, their ways of experiencing themselves and their
world so that they understand and explain the meaning and nature
of life-conduct in fundamentally new ways (2008: 147).
It is the latter they suggest which is most potent. It is what Foucault
calls subjectification: turning us into active subjects who are also
subject at the same time: ‘we have been freed from the arbitrary
prescriptions of religious and political authorities … but we have
been bound into relationships with new authorities, which are more
profoundly subjectifying because they emanate from our individual
desires (Rose 1996:17).
We now turn to see how we might apply this analytic concept of
authority relations to the accounts of our food activists and what this
enables us to scrutinise.
Summary of authorities for each educator
Ian, the bio-dynamic agricultural educator conceives himself as a
facilitator. He says: ‘So I don’t ever go and try to solicit people. I’m
not there trying to sell it so much as make it available for the people
who can see it.’ He claims that people change themselves through a
slow-burn model of conversion. This is the quintessential model of
facilitation where the educator takes a back seat and imagines the
relations between teacher and learner to be anti-authoritarian and
anti-didactic.
‘They had an illness in themselves or their family, they got to the stage where
their doctors said here’s your pill, go home, don’t come back, I can’t do
anything more for you. They’re called heart-sink patients. When you turn
up the doctor’s; his (sic) heart sinks because he can’t do anything with you.
These people go home and they sit on their butt for five minutes, five days,
five years, five decades, and one day they wake up and say I’m going to do
something. They set off on a path of investigation. It can take them to yoga,
or this, or that, or the other, but they actually out of their own passion affect
change. These are the people who go down the alternative pathways.’
For Susan, the authority relation is one of the benevolent, caring
professional. She said ‘we didn’t want to come in and intervene as
experts.’ The legitimation of authority is coming from a claim to be
doing good; first, in imagining peer education to be more democratic
than didacticism, and secondly in improving people’s lives. We have
discussed how Rose problematizes the first claim, and now refer to
how Coveney (2006) and Lupton (1996) problematize the second
claim. Coveney (2006) and Lupton (1996) point out, there are
contesting views among health scientists and social scientists about
how food is ‘good’ for you, and about whether food is to be conceived
primarily as medicine, fuel, or pleasure. The idea of ‘doing good’ - in
other words the authority that is invoked - comes from the premise
that ‘nutritional-science’ views about health override any others. Joan and Paul, the farmer-activists also draw on ‘nutritional
science’ knowledge but also emphasise their first-hand experience of
growing. They present themselves as modern and scientific but also
being close to the land and as rural stewards. They talk about the
importance of knowing about the soil and land.
‘… you look at a bok choy or a vegetable, you look - when you go and buy
it, you look at the bottom. If the end is brown, you know it’s not fresh. I
grow coriander and we had three farms. I would take it up to my Chinese
neighbours who also grow it and they could tell me which farm it came from
just by the taste. Now this is all to do with the nutrients and the soil.’ In so doing they are invoking what we have called elsewhere ‘farming
nature’ (Flowers and Swan 2011): Farming improves, tames and
cultivates nature, ‘through generations of embodied experience’
and knowledge through the senses (Franklin 2002, in Jacobsen
2004: 64). Farming nature invokes a closeness to land, animals
and soil, a simpler rural life, and straightforward people. This is in
contrast to industrialised and polluted city life with its corrupted
bodily knowledge (Vileisis 2004). Because farming nature is about
improving nature, authority for these farmer-activists comes from
their bodily knowledge augmented with scientific knowledge. ‘Doing
good’ is about connecting shoppers to ‘farming nature.
In attending to authorities instead of teacher-learner roles, we can
see that there are other relations between teachers and learners
than those based on a continuum of control or codified knowledge.
The concept enriches our understanding of the nature of teaching
and learning by bringing expanded notions of authority to include,
for example, the operation of wisdom, benevolence and senses,
all of which can be shaped into advice which affects our lives. For
Foucauldians, contemporary governmentality takes the form of advice
(Phillip 2009). The key issue is through what claims and techniques
can someone legitimately excise authority over the intimate details
of someone else’s life (Miller and Rose 2008: 149)? In our paper this
would include what people cook, eat, do with their bodies, do in their
domestic spheres, spend their money on and more.
A focus on authorities encourages us to question the ethics of ‘doing
good.’ Anne-Marie Mol (2010) argues that in many discourses on
eating healthily, food choices are seen as difficult with the body
imagined as too ‘greedy’ to eat too much of the ‘wrong’ foods. There
is some of this in the farmers’ discourses but their main concern is
how people access foods which are seen as ‘bodily healthy’. We can
see how classed, gendered and racialised notions of ‘healthism’ and
claims to be improving ‘health’ enable a range of experts to claim ‘a
new ethical regime for authority itself’ (Miller and Rose 2008:144).
Julie Guthman (2008) has shown how these types of ‘bringing good
food to others’ initiatives in the US reinforce whiteness, and she
and Jessica Paddock (2008) have argued against their middle class
assumptions about health. As Mol (2010) and Berlant (2008) argue
we need to interrogate the ethics of health being promulgated: what
about pleasure, satisfaction, and other kinds of health?
It is true that some adult education approaches examine ethics. But
often assumptions are made in advance. Thus a ‘boo-hooray’ binary
underpins characterisations of so-called instrumental education
versus progressive or radical education, with instrumental education
seen to be unethical and radical education the most ethical. Critical to
the food activist educators accounts of their authority is the idea that
they are being ethical because they don’t ‘impose’ their expertise on
learners. As Wendy Hollway (1991) notes this is a common-place idea
about power and knowledge amongst adult educators, who construct
this form of teaching as ‘democratic’ and ‘participative’ as if power has
been waived. What has been less examined in Foucauldian analyses is
the classed, racialised and gendered dimensions of authority relations
– who or what is seen to be authoritative. Whose ethics count? Who
can claim authority and who or what authorises it?
Teleologies
Finally, we contrast Rose’s notion of teleologies with the more
traditional concept of educational aims. Rose defines teleologies as
the goals, plans and endpoints of programs, and what he calls ‘forms
of life’ - subject positions - which are ideal ways to be and to act.
These are modes of being we hope to create in our selves and in others
which have an ethical valorisation to them (Dean 1996). Examples
include the ‘responsible prudent father’; the ‘worker accepting her/
his lot;’ the ‘good wife fulfilling her domestic duties with quiet
efficiency and self-effacement.’ In the field of food, examples include
the ‘health-conscious citizen who heeds dietary guidelines’; ‘ethically
conscious consumer who cares about the sustainability of the
environment’; or ‘creative and cosmopolitan food adventurer.’ In her
study of Norwegian food discourses, Annechen Bugge (2003) presents
three core subject positions: The ‘gourmet’ which values pleasure,
the ‘therapist’ values health consciousness, and the ‘traditionalist’
which values national sentiment and nostalgia. Subject positions
are forms of desireable subjectivity and clearly gendered, racialised
and classed. They are not a priori preformed but specific, concrete,
historical shapings. We can take up multiple, partial, elided and even
contradictory positions (Fejes 2008: 655).
A second important element is that the teleologies are articulated
in relation to specific problems and solutions about human conduct
and connected to wider governmental objectives such as national
prosperity, virtue, harmony, productivity, social order (Rose
1996). For Rose, health is one of the quintessential teleologies of
governmentality. Teleologies specify undesirable and desirable
behaviours at the level of populations, workers, families and society.
In relation to food, Jensen has referred to ‘the emerging citizenship
of food’ (Jensen 2004) in which traditionally thought of mundane
domestic habits are now ‘ethicalised.’ This is how individuals can
make ‘bigger acts’ through being ‘responsibilized.’ As Fiona Allon
writes of green home DIY, we are seeing the ‘micropolitics of the
household and the minuate of everyday behaviours’ connected to civic
responsibility (2011: 205), reinventing citizenship and patriotic duty
(2011: 207). Through these ordinary everyday habits, one can become
an ethical subject.
Summary of teleology for each educator
The desired subject-position of Ian is the spiritual grower who cares
for his or her self and the cosmos. This is not simply an organic
grower. They become stewards of the cosmos through growing food
in special ways – for example, fertiliser mixes with bone, feathers
and soil - which bring individual and environmental health. We note
that various commentators would classify biodynamic agriculture as
New Age and critique ‘New Age’ practices for reproducing a neoliberal agenda of self-responsibilisation. There are clearly some
aspects in this account which can be seen as self-responsibilisation,
but there are complications: the bio-dynamic farmer-educator does
not advocate the market as a solution and asserts that change in
food growing and consumer practices might take up to twenty years,
and can happen as much through serendipity as planning. There are
particularities to the biodynamics philosophy in its configuration
as a ‘spiritual science’ of biodynamics too which renders it more
complex. Thus it postulates a more fluid, open body than often
described in Foucauldian theorising (Gaynor 1998). In this way it
also moves outside of traditional nutritional pedagogies. It imagines
‘links between the dynamism of soils, plants and people, thus moving
from the ‘clinical nutrition’ apprehension of the body as a complex
collection of molecules, to an approach which considers bodies as
sites of a dynamic activity which persist through various spatialtemporal processes’ (Gaynor 1998: 19).
In the case of the Susan there is a more apparent link to neo-liberal
‘self-care’ governmentality agendas. The subject-position is the
frugal, obedient migrant cooking woman who must care for her
family’s health through making meals according to the ‘healthy
messages’ guidelines. She must cook according to calculated budgets
and scientifically defined nutritional values. This teleology represents
the quintessential neoliberal project of personalising social problems,
and we might add, gendering and racialising social problems. This
does not mean that there are not important benefits for the women
in the food project Susan runs. Nor are we suggesting that Susan is
unaware of the limitations of the approach. She clearly wanted to
organise other more macro reforms but did not have the power or
funding. Nevertheless, the subject position is of mothering health,
and with health and food defined in narrow ways.
For Joan and Paul, the desired subject-position is the label-literate
shopper who makes rational decisions on the basis of the provenance
of food. The notion of label-literacy connects with a wider notion
of consumer citizenship. Shopping-activism is much debated. Some food theorists have critiqued what they see as the neoliberal
rationalities and subjectivities which undergird consumer-activism
(Guthman 2007). This is because this teleology constructs the market
as the place where politics gets done and privileges the ‘choosing
subject’ (Guthman 2007). In this way, ‘citizenship [is] manifested
through the free exercise of personal choice… new relations [have
been formed] between the economic health of the nation and the
‘private’ choices of individuals … the citizen [is] assigned a vital
economic role in his or her activity as a consumer’ (Miller and
Rose 2008: 48-49). More recently food theorists have argued that
neo-liberal governmentality does not mop up all ways of being and
acting (Dowling 2010). For example, Robyn Dowling argues that it
is possible to ‘go beyond governmentality’ to exceed these subject
positions or create alternatives.
In contrast to the idea of educational aims, the notion of teleology
ups the stakes with its focus on ‘forms of life’ and their links to
wider governmental projects. In the case of the bio-dynamic farmereducator, health educator and alternative farmers discussed in this
paper, we can see an emphasis being placed on ‘forms of life’ where
individuals must take responsibility for the food they grow, eat and
shop. For our activists, good citizenship is being refracted through
a lens of care: for self, family, cosmos, farmer and land. With the
focus on the growing, shopping and cooking of food, these forms
of life and their ethics are highly classed, racialised and gendered
though. Class, gender and race are central to these forms of life as
feminist food writers have argued. Importantly for adult educators,
subject positions as forms of life are ways through which subjects are
brought to life through technologies and knowledge, and especially
self-knowledge. But they are also resisted and refused (see in this
issue Pike and Leahy). In relation to the food activists, more research
would need to be done on their learners and how these learners may
reproduce, embrace, or perhaps half-heartedly or intermittently
inhabit these forms of life, and reject the teleologies being set out
before them.
Conclusion
In this paper, we have examined the ways in which three types
of food activist-educators construct food, health, learners and
pedagogies using Rose’s framework of problematisations, authorities,
technologies and teleologies. We have argued that this framework
enables us to do two things: first, to open up the politics of adult
education pedagogies through a different model of power; and
secondly, to expand our understanding of food activist pedagogies.
In short, we can see that the three types of activists cannot be easily
categorised in any one school of thought, be it humanist, behaviourist,
radical or progressive. Even heuristically, these concepts, unlike
problematisation, flatten the complexity of how food and health
become analysed and treated in pedagogies. Looking at authority
relations rather than the role of the teacher gets at the ways in which
educators legitimate what they do in terms of doing good. The focus
on technologies brings new pedagogues to the fore; for example, it
would be quite unusual to discuss labels as pedagogical within more
traditional models. Rose’s framework enables us to think about the
ways in which adult educators, regardless of so-called ‘school of
thought’ are vehicles of power in mobilising technologies of self and
domination. Finally, by emphasising teleologies rather than aims, we
can get at the ways these pedagogies produce types of selves and types
of ethical habits.
Of course we do not know how these pedagogies are received by
the target learners and the extent to which learners accept, refuse,
and take up subject positions either apathetically or compliantly.
Moreover, research is needed on food pedagogies to identify what
‘substance’ gets ‘capacitated’: habits, skills, identities, emotions,
senses, knowledge (Flowers & Swan 2013).
Furthermore, Rose’s framework challenges the claims to
ethicalisation in adult education. Thus it provides us with a means to
examine adult education approaches and their terms and conditions
of ‘doing good.’ Rose’s framework describes processes which bring
subjects, identities, knowledges, and truths into being: they are not
simply pre-formed. They also bring political and ethical subjects into
being (King, S. 2003). We have seen some of the ethical work that
the ‘learners’ need to do according to our food activist educators.
Through what knowledges and truths do food activist educators make
their work ‘ethical’? Through what knowledges and truths do we as
adult educators make our work ‘ethical’? To produce our selves into
political and ethical subjects what ‘substance’ do we have to work on?
What is the prime material of our claims to being doing good (King,
L. 2003; King, S. 2003) ? For Rose, these questions would need to
be answered in relation to specific, concrete practices as power is not
general and abstract but located and technical.
Across the accounts of the food activists there is a multiplicity of
educational sources, aims and targets of intervention. One way
to understand this is to draw inspiration from Rose’s notion of
the ‘psy-complex’ which is an umbrella term that refers to the
expanding architecture of psychological expertise and techniques in
contemporary culture. The term complex is used to indicate a hybrid
assemblage of knowledges which may be contradictory but have a
family resemblance in how they understand problems and solutions.
In the same vein, we can see the contours of what we might call ‘
the food-knowledges complex’ across a range of food pedagogies,
including food activist educators. In the food-knowledges complex,
there is a congeries of ideas, ideals and practices. Whilst invoked,
psy knowledges are much less important than ‘health’ knowledges
of which ‘healthism’ is the most salient. As with Rose’s idea of the
‘psy complex,’ even though there is a diversity of views about what
health is (ontology) and what constitutes good health (knowledges),
there is a dominant view of health that gets propagated, and this is
used to undergird claims to be doing good. In this idea of the ‘foodknowledge complex’ we can see how problematisations, authorities,
technologies and teleologies are gendered, class and racialised and
constitute gender, class and race. In the psy-complex experts claim
to help us with what Rose (1996) calls ‘problems of living’; in the
food-knowledges complex, experts claim to help us with ‘problems of
eating’.
Different problematizations, technologies, authorities and teleologies
constitute food, health and bodies in various ways whilst at the same
time promoting, in this case, healthism. To argue this, is to say more
than there are various constructions being invoked in food activist
pedagogies: it is to suggest that food and health are activated by
activists in ontologically distinct ways across their pedagogies. This is
because pedagogies are performative and reproduce what Rose calls
‘forms of life.’ The pedagogies bring objects and kinds of humans
to life. In so doing, they can also bring types of lives to humans.
Across the food activist pedagogies, food becomes seen as spiritual,
a medicine, a choice, a responsibility and health expands to cover
the environment, spiritual connection, family health, agricultural
health, farmer’s economic health. For the educators, to get at the
‘health in food’ requires different activities and processes: food needs
to be grown, cooked, and shopped for in particular ways. What food
and health, then, are ‘really like’ and ‘should be like’ is contested
(Jacobsen 2004).
To understand this we draw on Mol’s (2002) notion of the ‘bodymultiple’: a concept she uses to show how patients’ bodies have quite
different ontological realities according to which medical practice they
are participating in. This is to argue that the body is not singular but
multiple, and enacted in varied and even incommensurable, situated
medical practices. Objects are multiple; and reality open (Jacobsen,
2004). In similar vein, John Law and Marianne Lien (2012) examine
how salmon become a very different type of ontological object across
different ‘salmon-reality’ practices from the biologist writing a
textbook on salmon to salmon farmers in Norway catching salmon.
Thus in examining the ‘food-knowledges complex,’ it may be helpful
to identify how what we could call ‘food-multiple’ and ‘healthmultiple’ constitute not only food and health as different objects, but
also how they make race, class and gender. Rose’s framework helps us
understand that what we see as problems and solutions as educators
are not self-evident nor equally distributed by race, gender and
class. One way to think about ‘doing good’ then in food pedagogies
is as ‘ontological politics’ (Mol 1999): the ways in which debates and
struggles need to be had over which food, pedagogical and health
realities to enact (Bacchi 2012; Jensen 2004).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Faculty of Arts and Social Science and the
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Research Centre at the University of
Technology, Sydney for funding this research and Stephen Fox,
Queen Mary College London University for helpful comments on our
draft work.
About the authors
Rick Flowers has been Head of Adult Education and Postgraduate
Programs in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the
University of Technology Sydney (UTS) since 2008. Rick was
Director of the Centre for Popular Education at the University of
Technology, Sydney from 1999 to 2007. The Centre for Popular
Education undertook research in environmental education and
advocacy, community cultural development, health education and
community development, the pedagogy and politics of working with
young people, union and community organising, and community
leadership. Rick has been undertaking research with Elaine Swan
about food pedagogies for just under two years. This has included
papers about activist films, food practices in mixed-race families,
and empirical research in southwestern Sydney about culinary
ethnicism in a project led by a food social enterprise. They have an
edited book with the title ‘Food Pedagogies’ coming out in 2013.
Elaine Swan is Head of Communication Studies in Faculty of
Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney
(UTS). Recent papers examines processes of whiteness: Swan (2010)
looks at the active labour of ignorance, audit culture and white
masculinity in UK universities; Swan (2009) focuses on the visual
image of the mosaic, a well worn cliché of diversity management
to explore the ideal of whiteness in race making; Swan (2011)
examines whiteness and the figure of the career woman in relation
to dirty work in women’s magazines. She has published two books:
Worked up Selves which looks at the interface between therapeutic
pedagogies and the workplace, and Diversity in Management with
Caroline Gatrell.
Contact details:
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney
(UTS).
Email: Rick.Flowers@uts.edu.au and Elaine.Swan@uts.edu.au
Educational alternatives in food production,
knowledge and consumption: The public
pedagogies of Growing Power and Tsyunhehkw^
Pierre Walter
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
This paper examines how two sites of adult learning in the food
movement create educational alternatives to the dominant U.S.
food system. It further examines how these pedagogies challenge
racialised, classed and gendered ideologies and practices in their
aims, curricular content, and publically documented educational
processes. The first case is Growing Power, an urban farm which
embraces small scale capitalism and vocational education as an
end toward community food security, social and ecological justice,
and anti-racist education. The second case, Tsyunhehkw^, is the
‘integrated community food system’ of the Oneida Nation in rural
Wisconsin, centred on cultural decolonisation through the growing
and eating of traditional Oneida foods. In both these projects, there
are strong possibilities to teach a critical, social justice alternative
to white, middle class norms and practices of food production and
consumption.
574 Educational alternatives in food production, knowledge and consumption
Introduction
This study contributes to an emerging and vibrant scholarship on
the forms, processes and sites of public pedagogy (Sandlin, Wright
& Clark 2011). This body of work intersects with a longer tradition
of research on adult learning in social movements, including the
environmental movement (Clover 2004; Foley 1999; Flowers &
Chodkiewicz 2009; Ollis 2008; Walter 2007). In general, public
pedagogy scholarship has tended to focus on critiques of hegemonic
structures of informal education and learning in popular culture,
following traditions of critical pedagogy (Sandlin, O’Malley &
Burdick 2011). However, research on disruptions of dominant
state and corporate ideologies through public pedagogies such as
culture jamming (Sandlin 2010), voluntary simplicity (Sandlin &
Walther 2009) and critical shopping (Jubas 2011) is also a part of
this scholarship. Research in social movement learning, although
necessarily including a critique of dominant ideologies and social
structures, has focused more on the potential of adult learning and
education for social change. To date, however, public pedagogy
and social movement learning in the food movement has received
relatively little attention, with notable exceptions (Flowers & Swan
2011; Sumner 2008).
The environmental movement, and more recently, the food
movement, have been criticised in feminist scholarship as repositories
of male, middle class norms, practices and oppressive gender
relations. In the food movement, calls to return to more holistic,
organic and local food production, for example, may simply mean
additional labour for women, and family meals may be sites of
violence against women, both symbolically and materially (DeVault
1991; Lupton 1996). More recently, scholars in the food movement
have also begun to critique the structures and relations of social
class, whiteness and power expressed in alternative food practices,
pedagogies, spaces and community institutions in the food movement
Pierre Walter 575
(Guthman 2008; Slocum 2006, 2007). Among others, Rachel
Slocum (2006: 337) argues for the importance of understanding
and acknowledging the history of racism, colonialism, and class and
gender oppression underlying the food system in attempts to enact
local alternatives to it:
It may be useful for community food advocates to actively consider
that the US food system was built on a foundation of genocide,
slavery and layers of racist institutions that have dispossessed
racialized groups of cultural pride, land and wealth, in gender- and
class-specific ways. It survives, for instance, through the work of
people of color who serve, disproportionately, in the hazardous
work of farm labor and food processing. Institutionalized racism
intersecting with processes of colonialism, welfare ideology and
gender and class oppression is also visible in the areas of food
insecurity, disease and excess death.
In the politics and activism of Indigenous scholars in North America
and beyond, strong themes of decolonisation, land sovereignty, selfdetermination, cultural revival and indigenous pedagogies in relation
to food are also strongly voiced (Grande 2004; LaDuke 2005).
Recently, Indigenous scholars have begun to take up the thorny
political question of feminisms and Indigenous thought, activism
and culture as well (Green 2007; Suzak et. al. 2010), with strong
implications for the study of colonialism, gender oppression, class
and race in the food movement.
The purpose of this paper is to examine how in two sites of public
pedagogy in the U.S. food movement there are possibilities for
‘activists’ to disrupt, contest and create alternatives to dominant
ideologies and practices in the food system, and to examine how
these pedagogies do or do not address racialised, classed and
gendered ideologies and practices in the food movement. The
paper describes the aims, curricular content, and their publically
documented educational processes. Other research on public
pedagogy in social movement sites suggests that adults may ‘engage
in critically transformative learning on their own’, focusing more on
‘noncognitive and embodied relations of learning…without the help of
an intervening adult educator and without critical, rational dialogue’
(Sandlin, Wright & Clark 2011: 11). Thus, the paper looks for evidence
of a public pedagogy promoting transformative learning in the two
sites under study as well.
Methodology
The study sites, located in the state of Wisconsin, U.S., illustrate
diverse public pedagogies embracing alternative ideologies and
material practices of food production and consumption, social
justice, cultural revival, and human health. The first case, that
of Growing Power, is an urban farm in an impoverished African
American neighborhood in the city of Milwaukee. This case embraces
small-scale capitalism and vocational education as an end toward
food security, multicultural leadership, social and ecological justice
and anti-racist pedagogy. The second case, Tsyunhehkw^, is the
‘integrated community food system’ of the Oneida Nation in rural
northeastern Wisconsin. It centres on recovering, producing,
processing and promoting healthy, traditional Oneida foods; that is,
on decolonising local food and life systems.
Data for the study was collected in brief site visits, documents
(including newsletters, annual reports, conference programs, and
brochures) and an exhaustive internet search using Google -Web,
-Video and -News search engines. This form of digital research is
increasingly prevalent in adult education research (e.g. Irving &
English 2011; McGregor & Price 2010). Data were analysed using
ethnographic content analysis (Altheide et. al. 2008) in a two-stage
process for analysing digital websites and media as public pedagogy
(Kelly 2011). In the first phase, all data were reviewed for each case,
and a composite case ‘portrait’ developed; in the second phase,
characteristic elements for each case were identified, and findings
Pierre Walter 577
solidified in a second review of data for each case. Internet sites
used for the study included each initiative’s webpages (for Growing
Power almost 50; for Oneida over 150), social media (both have
Facebook and Twitter sites), blogs, independent news media accounts
(67 articles for Growing Power, 28 for Oneida), and in the case of
Growing Power, 54 videos.
The study examines only the claims made by each case in their
publically available documents, and thus does not reveal how and
what learners in these sites actually experience and learn, except
anecdotally. The study likewise does not directly address how
educators in these settings, as ‘the critical link between hegemonic
popular culture and critical awareness of that culture as hegemonic’,
might help to ‘foster critical dialogue and help adult learners
understand the power and politics at work within popular culture’
(Sandlin, Wright & Clark 2011: 10). Thus, in one sense, this study,
like many others preceding it (Sandlin, O’Malley & Burdick 2011:
359), is an analysis of an ‘imagined public pedagogy’, as this pedagogy
is evident in the documents of each case. In this regard, the study
provides a good starting point for further empirical field research on
adult learners and learning in these and other informal pedagogical
sites within the food movement.
Community-based capitalism, food production and social justice
The city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s claim to fame has been its
German immigrant breweries (Miller, Schlitz, Pabst), industrial
manufacturing, and a radical political history in which ‘Sewer
Socialists’ elected three Socialist mayors from 1910 to 1960. Today,
Milwaukee is a city of about 600,000 people surrounded by another
1 million people in its suburbs, which have grown dramatically since
the 1960s, in part as a consequence of ‘white flight’ from the city
proper. Like other cities in the Midwestern Rust Belt, Milwaukee
suffered from a downturn in manufacturing in the late 1960s,
in which thousands of once well-paid industrial workers found
themselves slipping out of the middle class and into the low wage
service and healthcare sectors. Endemic poverty began to characterise
many neighbourhoods of the urban core, including those which were
predominantly African American (City of Milwaukee 2012a). The
city is today deeply divided by race and class both geographically
and economically: according to one recent study, Milwaukee is in
fact the most racially segregated city in the U.S., with urban blacks
disproportionately suffering the ill effects of job and tax base losses to
the prosperous white suburbs (Denvir 2011).
Together with an enduring legacy of racial inequality, Milwaukee
has also historically been the site of grassroots movements for peace
and social justice, environmentalism, and civil rights, of innovations
in community development, and of numerous attempts to bridge
its economic and racial divides. In the last decade, a food and
sustainability movement in the city has grown in leaps and bounds,
with strong roots in impoverished African American communities,
among others (Broadway 2009; City of Milwaukee 2012b). One of
the most long-standing and well-known of these local food security
initiatives is Growing Power, an integrated urban farm and nonprofit training centre established by African America entrepreneur,
farmer and community leader, Will Allen.
A former professional basketball player and corporate businessman,
Allen has for the last twenty years built a community-based urban
farming system on two acres of land situated directly in the midst
of one of Milwaukee’s poorest African American neighbourhoods,
close by to the city’s largest public housing project. As a nonprofit organization and land trust, the mission of Growing Power
(2012a) is ‘supporting people from diverse backgrounds, and the
environments in which they live, by helping to provide equal access
to healthy, high-quality, safe and affordable food for people in
all communities’. The Growing Power (2012b) farm site houses
Pierre Walter 579
20,000 plants and vegetables, 100,000 fish (tilapia, perch, blue gill),
chickens, goats, ducks, rabbits and bees, and supplies cheap organic
food to some 10,000 people. Growing Power makes 400 ‘mobile
grocery store’ deliveries of ‘safe, healthy and affordable produce’ to
local pick-up points, manages a cooperative network of small family
farmers practicing sustainable farming, supplies fresh produce to
some 25-40,000 Milwaukee Public School students, is involved in
numerous community and school garden initiatives, donates produce
to local food pantries, and operates two farmers markets in poor
neighborhoods which otherwise have difficult access to healthy food.
The organization has taught and employed hundreds of local African
American youth and others in urban agriculture, building their
professional skills and food knowledge, and enabling them to pursue
new ways of attaining good health.
Growing Power’s educational aims are enacted in part in its focus
on developing community capacity for sustainable urban agriculture.
The farm is envisioned as an ‘educational lab’ and ‘Community
Food Center and Training Facility’; it is a ‘place to try new things,
learn what we do not know, and improve on what we do. We believe
that farming should be simple and accessible to all people, so we
create methods for growing and livestock management that can be
replicated in every neighborhood, from Detroit, Michigan to Ghana,
Africa’ (Growing Power 2012c). To this end, the farm offers daily
tours, numerous hands-on workshops on composting, aquaponics,
solar energy and animal husbandry, long-term (five month) training
programs on community food systems, 3-month and year-long
apprenticeships, one year vocational training for ‘Food Systems
Specialists’, service learning and community volunteer opportunities,
accredited in-service training for school teachers, and year-round
youth leadership training. Regular community feasts and celebrations
at the farm are a critical part of food education and community
building as well. Off-site, Growing Power teaches about community
food systems within a network of school and community gardens,
urban farms and some 16 ‘Regional Outreach Training Centers’
around the U.S. (Growing Power 2012d).
As part of its mission to promote progressive social change in the
food movement, and racial and economic equality for poor people of
colour, in particular, Growing Power has established the Growing
Food and Justice for All Initiative (GFJI). As leader Will Allen notes:
‘The people hit hardest by the current food system are usually
people of color – but even a decade ago, farming carried a stigma
in these communities. There were memories of sharecropping,
like in my own family. Today, folks are jumping onto the “good
food” revolution, and it’s crucial they see faces that look like their
own’ (quoted in Kaufman 2010: 17). The mission of GFJI is thus
both to encourage the participation of people of colour in the
food movement and to address racism and social injustice on a
broad scale: GFJI is ‘an initiative aimed at dismantling racism
and empowering low-income and communities of color through
sustainable and local agriculture’ (Growing Power 2012e).
GFJI’s aims are accomplished in the building of a national antiracism network through a blog, newsletter, website, and social
networking, provision of financial and educational support for
community initiatives to dismantle racism, policy activism, and
training of community-based anti-racism trainers (Growing Power
2012e). Above all else, however, is GFJI’s annual conference,
and strong presence at Growing Power’s (2012f) urban farming
conferences. The ‘Intensive Leadership Facilitation Training’ (ILFT)
immediately before the 4th annual GFJI Conference in 2011, for
example, was ‘designed to build a community of leaders and provide
intensive training and dialogue for participants to facilitate antiracist food justice trainings in their own regions/communities’ (GFJI
2011: 7). During the ILFT training, participants engaged in ‘farming
activities (at Growing Power’s farm site) that explore how to build
a just food system, identify barriers to achieving justice and equity,
historical challenges and community building’ (ibid: 7). They further
Pierre Walter 581
discussed ‘examples of institutional and structural racism and how it
operates…, practical applications of facilitating change and becoming
a change agent’, and individual roles and processes of anti-racism
work, including strategies and action plans (ibid: 7). In general,
GFJI educational initiatives address the intersectionality of various
oppressions, including racism, class, homophobia and sexism. At
the September 2012 Growing Power Conference (upward of 3,000
participants expected), for instance, the GFJI (2012) Track includes
topics such as Race and Food; LGBTQ People in the Food Movement;
Environmental Injustice; Indigenous Rights: Global Movement,
Survival and Cultural Preservation; Occupy the Food System: Action,
Organize and Protest; Practical Food Justice with Hands on Tools and
Activities to Take to Your Community; and Community Based Policy.
No. 1: Milwaukee
Food production and the recovery of Indigenous knowledge and
identity
Formerly occupying some 6 million acres of land in New York State,
the Oneida People now living in Wisconsin were, before they were
dispossessed of their lands, slash and burn agriculturalists, who
rotated crops of corn, squash and beans through swidden fields,
hunted and ‘farmed’ deer, caught fish and collected wild foods
(Loew 2001: 100-102). In the late 1800s, the Oneida were forced
off their New York lands by hostile white settlers and unscrupulous
land speculators. In the early 1800s, they migrated to Green Bay,
Wisconsin and purchased a small strip of land from the Menominee
Nation, settling along the Fox River to practice sedentary agriculture
(Oneida Tribe 2012a). In 1838, the Nation was allotted 65,430 acres
(263 km2) of land, but in a familiar history of dispossession, by 1999,
most of this land was in private hands (Loew 2001). However, by
2009, with buy-back of traditional lands by tribal government, the
Oneida Nation regained sovereignty over 22,398 acres (90 km2) of
their original reserved lands (Griffin 2009). Today, there are 16,567
Oneida people in Wisconsin, about 6,000 of whom live on or near the
Oneida reservation (WSTI 2011).
From 1893 to 1920, Oneida children, like many other Native
Americans, were subject to forced assimilation policies in Indian
boarding schools. In these schools (some as far away as Pennsylvania
and Virginia), Oneida children were punished if they spoke their
native language or practiced cultural rituals, were clad in drab and
proper Victorian era clothes, had their hair cut short, were assigned
foreign names, fed foreign foods, and taught a curriculum comprised
of half academic training and half menial, and often gruelling, manual
labour (Loew 2001). The ‘de-culturalising’ aim of these schools,
whereby native children were forcibly removed from their homes to
rid them of their Indigenous culture, was similar to assimilationist
policies across the U.S., Canada, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand
(Smith 2009). For the Oneida people, a cultural renaissance of
sorts began in the Red Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s
in urban Milwaukee (Loew 2001). By the 1980s, the Oneida were
among the first Indian tribes to sign a gambling agreement with
the State of Wisconsin, and subsequently opened a thriving casino,
hotel, restaurant and convention centre complex. Funds generated
were then invested on Oneida lands in a ‘textbook example’ of
community development and cultural revival: this included land
buy-backs, establishment of a healthcare clinic, housing, a court and
police system, social welfare programs, a library, an early childhood
program, elder care, higher education scholarships, a tribal school
system, and an integrated community food system (Loew 2001;
Oneida Tribe 2012b).
As one strand of Oneida cultural revival and education, the Oneida
Nation elementary school was established in 1994. Together with
the Oneida secondary school, the school system now enrols over
400 students (WSTI 2011), and offers a bilingual and bicultural
curriculum based on traditional Oneida culture, comprising Oneida
Pierre Walter 583
language, music, history, Indigenous knowledge and customary
traditions. Included in this education is the elementary school’s
Three Sisters Garden (corn, squash, beans), and medicinal and herb
gardens. Here, children grow Indigenous foods, learn Oneida food
stories and dances, harvest crops and learn to cook and present a
community feast of traditional foods (Griffin 2009; Vasquez 2011).
As a second major strand in recovering and promoting traditional
culture, since 1994, the Oneida Nation has developed the ’Oneida
Community Integrated Food Systems’ comprised of an 83 acre
certified organic farm, a 40 acre apple orchard (4,000 trees), a
cannery, greenhouses, small-scale aquaponics, a food pantry, health
centre, farmers market, a museum, a retail store selling traditional
foods, and a youth program (Oneida Tribe 2012c). Within this food
system, the Tsyunhehkw^ (‘life sustenance’) program is a ‘culturally
and community based agricultural program for the Oneida Nation’
whose aim is to play ‘a pivotal role in the reintroduction of high
quality, organically grown foods that will ensure a healthier and more
fulfilling life for the On^yote?aka (Oneida), and (be) the facilitator
of positive dietary and nutritional change’ (Ibid.). The three major
components of the system are agriculture, the cannery and retail
sales.
Jeff Metoxen (2005), manager of Tsyunhehkw^, writes about the
reason why traditional agricultural and food processing are being
recovered, adapted and taught to community members and others:
It is our On^yote?aka (Oneida) Cultural Belief that when the
humans were created, shukwaya?tisu (Creator) instructed them
that all that was needed for a good life was readily available
to them. They would want for nothing; there was water, food,
medicines – everything needed to sustain them. All that was asked
of the humans was to gather what was provided and give thanks…
Over time, we failed to provide this recognition and ignored our
responsibilities…the Three Sisters were going to leave this world
if the people continued in this way. The people recognized they
had failed and began again to honor the Three Sisters in their
ceremonies…We continue today in honoring all of creation, and
we recognize the Three Sisters in our ceremonies…As we care for
the Three Sisters, we continue to learn how to accomplish this,
and share that knowledge. Caring for the White Corn goes hand
in hand with caring for and respecting our natural environment
and all that it provides in return. It is our job to respect all that the
Creator has offered, and we look at food as the natural medicines
and health provided for us by the Creator.
Central to these teachings is the recovery of Indigenous knowledge
of the Three Sisters (corn, squash, beans), and in particular, the
revival of Oneida varieties of White Corn, a traditional protein-rich
variety of corn at the heart of the Oneida diet, culture, cosmology,
health and agriculture. Teachings in the agricultural component of
Tsyunhehkw^ are offered to the community in hands-on workshops
on growing of organic heirloom White Corn, creating a Three Sisters
Garden, and growing traditional herbs, berries and vegetables. In the
revival of traditional agricultural knowledge, visits back to Oneida
relations living in New York and Canada are also important (Vasquez
2011). In fact, the original White Corn seeds now planted on-site in
Wisconsin were obtained from the Oneida Nation in New York in
1992 (Metoxen 2005).
Another source of traditional knowledge and education is The
Oneida Museum: it explains the history of White Corn, the Three
Sisters, the Green Corn Story, cycle of ceremonies, the Thanksgiving
Address, women and men’s traditional roles, the longhouse, and
Oneida language, music, symbolism, history and art. In the fall
of the year, the annual Tsyunhehkw^ Harvest and Husking Bee
serves as a further pedagogical site where Oneida people ‘share
the knowledge of snapping, husking and braiding our White Corn.
With community support the corn is hand harvested and braided
to dry in the Oneida tradition’ (p. 4). Elders and historical records
are consulted to learn more about ‘traditional ways to care for the
crops, land, and the animals’ and much knowledge is gained as well
Pierre Walter 585
through trial and error (Metoxen 2005: 4; Vasquez 2011). At the
Tsyunhehkw^ Cannery, workshops are regularly presented on how
to make culturally significant White Corn foods like corn soup, corn
bread, corn meal, flour and dehydrated corn as well as canning and
preservation of locally grown fruits and vegetables (Oneida Tribe
2012d). Finally, educational aims of Tsyunhehkw^ are put into
practice in the Oneida Tsyunhehkwa Retail Store, which sells and
teaches about a wide range of traditional medicinal herbs and oils,
White Corn products (from the Cannery), wild rice and herbal teas
(Oneida Tribe 2012e). In this effort, the store runs an interactive
Facebook information and advice blog, holds an annual open house,
and offers a Brown Bag lunch series, with regular workshops on
holistic and traditional Oneida medicine.
Discussion
Both of the community initiatives presented above appear to be
rich pedagogical sites in the food movement. Each aims to convey
a particular oppositional knowledge, practice, ideology and ethic of
local, sustainable food production and consumption. In examining
their public pedagogy (i.e., the documentation found in their websites,
reports, newsletters, blogs and other public media such as videos and
news accounts), it is evident that these sites provide an educational
curriculum which could be used to foster grassroots, oppositional
adult learning – in workshops, demonstrations, hands-on experience,
cultural rituals, ceremonies and feasts, experimentation, and the
sharing of local and indigenous knowledge in stories and community
dialogue.
The two cases present an educational curriculum which is in part
about learning, re-learning and re-valuing traditional foodwork
– including growing, preparing, processing and harvesting food,
but also eating food: as re-envisioned practices, these are in fact
pedagogical acts. This pedagogy then helps not only to undo the
legacies of racism, colonialism and dispossession and the whiteness’
upon which the US food system is built (Slocum 2006), but also to
establish a more just system of food security, cultural identity and
health for racialised groups such the Oneida and marginalised African
American urban youth. Part of the intent of organizing the many
shared meals, rituals and food ceremonies in the life of Tsyunhehkw^
(e.g. the Oneida Harvest and Husking Bee), for example, is to teach
a common Oneida identity through the act of preparing and eating
traditional foods. This sort of learning, as it is described by the Oneida
organizers and public descriptions of Tsyunhehkw^, is partly about
the recovery of lost knowledge and cultural practices, but is also about
embodied, relational and spiritual learning alongside others in the
community; it is means of reviving collective Oneida identity through
food.
The teaching and learning which takes place through Tsyunhehkw^
might thus be understood as a decolonising, political act of popular
education, in which not only cultural revival, but also food and land
sovereignty, social justice, and critical place-based education meet
at a particular juncture of adult learning the food movement. The
connection of food and land as a source of identity, sustenance and
collective history is particularly important in the larger project of
re-possessing dispossessed territories, place and culture. Part of the
history of colonisation of Native American peoples was to take away
both native lands and the native foods which flourished upon these
lands. As close as a century ago, most American Indian Nations
produced almost all their own food; today they typically produce
less than 20% (HTE 2009: 19). Native American reservations, like
the urban inner city, are often food deserts, a long car ride from the
nearest supermarkets and sources of healthy food. Partly as a result
of their reliance on imported, highly processed industrial foods, many
Native communities suffer high rates of diabetes, heart disease and
obesity. These diseases are enduring legacies of land dispossession,
de-culturalisation through boarding schools, and the concomitant
Pierre Walter 587
loss of cultural, agricultural, spiritual and ancestral knowledge
(LaDuke 2005; McGregor 2004). In overcoming the ill effects of
colonialism through Tsyunhehkw^, Oneida youth and adults may
discover their history and culture, for example, in the act of gardening
the Three Sisters, learning to braid and hang White Corn for drying,
participating in Oneida rituals and ceremonies of planting, growth
and thanksgiving, or simply listening as community elders recount
the Oneida Creation Story or equally, the traumas and violence of
boarding schools. This learning in Tsyunhehkw^ clearly involves
more than just cultural learning: it is also political education, and
potentially transformative.
In Growing Power, like Oneida’s Tsyunhehkw^, there are numerous
community meals and events as part of the public pedagogy; however,
unlike Tsyunhehkw^, these farm meals often bring together people
of different class, racial and ethnic backgrounds to prepare, eat and
celebrate the farm’s food, which they have collectively helped to grow.
In the racially and class-divided City of Milwaukee, these meals can
represent a political act: when local African American people in a
poor ‘black’ neighbourhood work alongside, sit down to eat a meal,
and talk together with middle class people from the city’s nearby
‘white’ Eastside neighbourhood, the process can be transformative
for both. That is, it may involve a realisation of shared humanity,
but also better understandings of relations of power, white privilege
and difference across race, class and culture, and perhaps even
promote a shared commitment to political activism for change. On
the other hand, there is also the possibility that ‘white’ people dining
with ‘black’ people may be (unwittingly) engaging in the cultural
politics of ‘eating the other’, in an act of cultural commodification
and appropriation (hooks 1992). As bell hooks (1992: 21) tells us, in
this form of cross-cultural consumption, ‘ethnicity becomes spice,
seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white
culture’. Along these lines, Wisconsin native Lisa Heldke (2001: 78),
for example, writes of her ‘adventures’ in ‘cultural food colonialism’ as
she sampled a diversity of foods at the ‘ethnic’ restaurants of Chicago,
Minneapolis and St. Paul: ‘I was motivated by a deep desire to have
contact with and somehow to own an experience of an Exotic Other
to make myself more interesting’. The political economy of urban
space, food, race and poverty is likewise an important consideration
in understanding the potential for cross-cultural learning in Growing
Power. Sharon Zukin (2005), for instance, examines how a history of
‘shopping for ethnicity’ across spatial barriers of class and ethnicity
in New York City has led to urban gentrification, forcing African
American, Latino, Caribbean and other minority and working class
residents out of their own neighbourhoods. Thus the very revival of
a neighbourhood through the efforts of organizations like Growing
Power might in fact sow the seeds of its later spatial consumption by
wealthier, ‘whiter’ outsiders. How these issues are addressed in the
public pedagogy of social justice and anti-racism in Growing Power is
an important question for further research.
Since Growing Power’s educational practices are centred symbolically
and materially on empowering marginalised people of colour, and
not primarily in the (‘white’) alternative food movement, they are,
however, well-positioned to address the racist and class foundations
of the U.S. food system, and the likelihood of further ‘colonial’ abuse.
To this end, Growing Power offers a curriculum of safe, skilled, and
productive agricultural labour and education for African American
and other youth, promotes food security, sustainability and social
justice in the poor, racialised communities in which it operates,
and directly addresses sustainability, racism and social justice
in its public pedagogy. Unlike much of the north American food
movement, Growing Power is not centred on the norms, people and
food practices of middle class ‘whiteness’ (Guthman 2008; Slocum
2006); but instead proposes educational alternatives to these. In this,
Growing Power, and above all, its Growing Food and Justice for
All Initiative, join other efforts attesting to the power of anti-racist
educative activism in the food movement, such as Mo’ Betta Foods
Pierre Walter 589
in Oakland, California, Food from the Hood in Los Angeles, and Just
Foods in New York (Guthman 2008: 394). As such, Growing Power
and these other social justice initiatives appear to embody a space and
pedagogy of hope rather than white, middle class privilege in the food
movement.
From this study, it is not clear how gender roles and relations play out
in the public pedagogy of either Growing Power or Tsyunhehkw^,
although these are important questions for research on public
pedagogy in the food movement. What, for example, is gender
division of labour in the growing of food, the processing, preparation
and serving of food, the organizational and productive decisions,
the distribution of income and benefits? How might these two cases
of public pedagogy be oppressive to women, or alternately, a source
of increased capabilities and freedom? Does a return to traditional
food cropping, harvest and preparation in Tsyunhehkw^ mean an
intensification of gender roles, an increase in women’s work and a
decrease in power, for example? Or is the very shape of this feminist
analysis of foodwork simply a further expression of ‘whitestream’
Western colonialism; a misunderstanding of the many complex and
diverse relations of gender in indigenous societies, some of which
hold women and two-spirited people in positions of great reverence
and power (Grande 2004; St. Denis 2007)? These are also excellent
questions for further research.
Conclusion
It is evident from this study that Tsyunhehkw^ and Growing
Power act as sites of public pedagogy which disrupt and create
educational alternatives to dominant racialised and classed ideologies
and practices in the U.S. food system. As such, they contribute to
more critical, socially aware conceptualizations and practices of
production, distribution and consumption in the food movement,
as it moves away from its white, middle class foundations toward
more broadly inclusive incarnations. These pedagogies are cognizant
of historical legacies of racism, colonialism and class oppression
and work to overcome them. By contrast, it is not clear how they
take up an understanding of gender oppression in their educational
work. In both cases, the importance of informal and transformative
adult learning is evident in their aims, curriculum and educational
processes. How and where this learning occurs in practice, and how
it might be encouraged by adult educators; that is, how these sites
mobilise people to social action, who is mobilised, and with what
results, is fertile ground for further research, both in these and other
sites of public pedagogy in the food movement.
Note: Many thanks to anonymous reviewers and to editors Rick Flowers and
Elaine Swan for their critical comments and suggestions on several drafts of
this paper, particularly in relation to theorising sexism and racism in the food
movement.
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About the author
Pierre Walter is an Associate Professor in the Adult Learning and
Education (ALE) graduate program at the University of British
Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His teaching and research focus on
adult learning in community-based ecotourism in Southeast Asia,
comparative and international education, and social movement
learning in the North American environmental movement.
Contact details
Department of Educational Studies, 2125 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC,
V6T 1Z4, Canada.
Email: pierre.walter@ubc.ca
When traditions become innovations and
innovations become traditions in everyday food
pedagogies
Helen Benny
Swinburne University of Technology
This paper explores the way learning to cook remains important for
the maintenance of ‘ethnic’ food traditions and how sharing food
knowledge plays a role in intercultural exchanges. Ethnographic
data from an ongoing study in Melbourne is presented to highlight
how, in everyday practices, both tradition and innovation are
involved in learning experiences related to cooking. Using an
everyday multiculturalism perspective, the study was designed
to investigate the resilience of ethnic food cultures in the face
of increasing industrialisation in global food systems. In this
paper, I focus in particular on the interplay between tradition
and innovation in everyday settings by drawing closely on three
women’s accounts of cooking and learning.
The women remain attached to the food traditions they learned by
observing and taking part in daily routines of meal preparation
596 When traditions become innovations and innovations
and they stress that many of these practices need to be preserved.
At the same time, their accounts reveal how everyday settings
can be considered as ‘pedagogical spaces’ where opportunities for
innovation arise and new knowledge about food and cooking can be
acquired. Families, schools, travel, workplaces and neighbourhood
networks emerged as sites where traditional food knowledge can
be shared and new skills developed. The paper contributes to our
understanding of food pedagogies by highlighting the dynamic
relationship between tradition and innovation in everyday,
mundane encounters and exchanges in multicultural societies.
Introduction
This paper explores the way learning to cook remains important for
the maintenance of ‘ethnic’ food traditions and how sharing food
knowledge plays a role in intercultural exchanges. Ethnographic data
from an ongoing study in Melbourne is presented to highlight how,
in everyday practices, both tradition and innovation are involved
in learning experiences related to cooking. The empirical work
described here took place during 2010-2011 in a study designed
to investigate the resilience of ethnic food cultures in the face of
increasing industrialisation in global food systems. In this paper I
focus, in particular, on the interplay between tradition and innovation
in everyday settings by drawing closely on three women’s accounts of
cooking and learning.
Many observers believe traditional cooking skills are receding
because modern, industrialized food systems offer consumers
more opportunities to eat pre-prepared meals. However, notions of
tradition and innovation used in discussions of cooking practices
are problematic because they have not been carefully defined (Short
2006: 113). In both scholarly and popular discourse on cooking, terms
such as ‘traditional’ are loosely defined but generally used to mean
Helen Benny 597
natural, unprocessed and ‘authentic’ products and ‘cooking from
scratch’. Innovation in cooking also can, and is, defined in various
ways. One way it can be defined is to indicate practices associated
with processed food products and shortcuts (Ritzer 2008); another is
to indicate new ‘foodie’ trends (Laudan 2001). But for the purpose of
this paper, I will define innovation as the practice of changing one’s
‘traditional’ foods as one draws on new knowledges and skills from
others.
The lack of definition has led to imprecise notions of what constitute
actual cooking skills and how they are learned. For instance, Frances
Short asks why frying a piece of fresh fish is considered to be ‘proper
cooking’, when heating a ready-made fish meal in a microwave – a
practice that might require as much physical dexterity as frying fresh
fish – is not seen in the same way? (2006: 99). According to Short,
this suggests that in continuing debates about the perceived decline in
cooking capabilities (Lang & Caraher 2001; Murcott 1997), knowing
how to cook is often portrayed solely as a set of technical skills. Short
argues this is insufficient for explaining how food knowledge and
skills are acquired and reproduced. She recommends that attention
be shifted to the person performing or learning the tasks involved
in cooking. A ‘person-centred’ focus, rather than concentrating on
technical abilities, enables us to take into account the attitudes,
beliefs and daily lived experience of the person doing the cooking
(Short 2006: 98). For this paper, using such an approach provides a
way of understanding how broader social and cultural processes have
a bearing on learning to cook as the following review of the literature
illustrates.
Food: learning and tradition
There is a significant body of work on food exploring notions of
continuity and change in class, gender, identity and consumption,
but there is little discussion in this literature on learning to cook
(notable exceptions include Duruz 2005; Short 2006; Sutton 2001).
Furthermore, there is emergent literature on how food in everyday
intercultural interactions provides opportunities for learning (Wise
2011; Noble 2009; Flowers & Swan 2012). This brief survey of
the literature will suggest how questioning the interplay between
tradition and innovation in contemporary multicultural societies is
helpful for revealing the processes involved in learning to cook as well
as for understanding how people learn about other cultures through
their foodways.
Alan Warde (1997) points out that many concerns about food
in contemporary societies are laments for the perceived passing
of traditional cooking practices (see also Lang & Caraher 2001).
These concerns are in line with the claims in George Ritzer’s
McDonaldization thesis that eating cultures are increasingly
dominated by standardization and homogeneity (2008).
At the same time, however, a substantial body of work stresses the
resilience of ethnic cuisines in the modern world. For instance,
maintaining traditional cooking and eating practices is seen as
fundamental to processes of multicultural home-building and
creating a sense of belonging in a new setting for those in migrant
communities (Hage 1997). Traditional ethnic food practices are
closely linked to the symbolic significance of shared cultural values
(Kwik 2008), as markers of ethnic identity (Beoku-Betts 1995),
and for providing cultural strategies for negotiating generational
differences (Vallianatos & Raine 2008). While such works are useful
for framing multicultural experiences, they frequently leave aside the
question of how cooking skills and practices are actually acquired.
One scholar who does focus on this question is David Sutton.
In his treatment of food and memory, David Sutton focuses on
food traditions being taught through processes of ‘embodied
apprenticeship’. In these processes, culinary knowledge and skills
are transmitted and received through taking part in the physical
Helen Benny 599
performance of ‘doing/learning cooking’ (2001: 126). Because much
of the practical knowledge required for accumulating cooking skills
involves sedimentation of sensory imagery into memories, watching
and copying are the primary way this kind of learning is achieved.
These are largely informal, mimetic processes where cultural taste
preferences and memories become embedded by observing, listening,
smelling and tasting. A bank of cognitive, sensory and physical skills
develop together to build a ‘stock of knowledge’ upon which to draw
in future practice.
A stock of knowledge involves more than simply knowing the manual
tasks necessary for preparing food. Short argues that ‘perceptual,
conceptual, emotional and logistical’ skills are all brought into
play when people cook. This is ‘tacit’ knowledge necessary for the
organization and multi-tasking involved in routine meal provision
(2006: 61). Sutton (2001) emphasises that most of this knowledge
is absorbed casually and often without formal ‘lessons’: the body
learns through habituated practice in a way that cannot be set down
in more formal situations such as following written instructions in
recipe books. It is, as Short suggests, ‘inadvertently gathered knowhow’ (2006: 52). Sensory cues such as smell and taste are particularly
important for indicating when food is correctly prepared according
to custom and the cultural tastes of those who will be eating it (Choo
2004).
As many observers point out, the assumption that domestic foodwork
is primarily the responsibility of women is found in most societies
(Beagan et. al 2008; Beoku-Betts 1995; Lupton 1996). Embodied
apprenticeship is shaped by the gendered division of domestic labour
and is illustrated by the fact that it is frequently an older female
relative who is demonstrating how a dish should be prepared and a
younger female who is expected to absorb the knowledge imparted by
taking part in the process with her (Sutton 2001: 134).
Another salient feature in how traditional food practices are learned
is repetition. Gestures and practices used for preparing food are
repeated as is the seasonal rotation of dishes associated with
traditional cuisines. Warde claims familiarity engendered by repeated
practice is indicative of the way certain dishes or entire cuisines
come to be regarded as traditional (1997: 64). For food to be judged
as belonging to a tradition it must be thought of as long-lived and
authentic. In Warde’s definition these become moral and aesthetic
values.
There is, however, a danger of romanticising notions of tradition
(Laudan 2001). Jean Duruz notes that regrets about supposedly ‘lost’
traditions are often voiced as discourses of ‘nostalgic return’ to a past
where it is imagined the food was better than that of the present day
(Duruz 1999). As these writers note, the problem with such accounts
is they ignore the difficulties of daily life such as the labour-intensive
practices involved in ‘traditional’ meal provision. Who today, Short
asks (2006: 101), really wants to pluck their own chickens or mill
their own grain? Indeed, it has been suggested that calls for the
resurrection of traditional cooking practices might disguise a socially
conservative argument that women ‘belong’ in the kitchen and are to
blame if negative outcomes arise when traditional practices fall into
disuse (Lang & Caraher 2001: 11).
This raises interesting questions about the continuation of traditional
food practices and learning to cook in modern societies. While people
find the idea of longevity in a cuisine an appealing one (Warde 1997:
66), there is widespread agreement in the literature that traditions
are not fixed and immutable. Sutton argues that even the most
entrenched customs associated with traditional cooking can be
disrupted by circumstance and therefore the stock of knowledge must
allow for adaptation (Sutton 2001: 129). Warde found that a certain
amount of improvisation is necessary for a practice to be successfully
Helen Benny 601
sustained over time because other factors intrude especially the
amount of time and money available for cooking (1997: 129).
In sum then, the literature on food and tradition tells us that people
remain attached to distinct styles of cooking and transmission of
food knowledge because they regard them as providing comfort
and a sense of belonging in relation to collective cooking and eating
practices. There are equally appealing attractions to be found through
learning about other cuisines and customs and in the next section one
way this occurs is explored.
Food: learning and everyday multiculturalism
Everyday multiculturalism perspectives are particularly useful for
exploring ideas about food and learning in contemporary Australia
because, as Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham point out, an
approach that takes ‘the lived experience of diversity’ as its central
focus is able to show how ‘social actors experience and negotiate
cultural difference on the ground’ (Wise & Velayutham 2009: 3).
Everyday multiculturalism emphasizes ‘ordinary’ encounters with
difference and diversity; ‘micro-moments’ that occur in mundane
situations such as workplaces, neighbourhoods or schoolyards (Noble
2009). For the purposes of this paper, when these encounters involve
interactions around food they become important for considering how
possibilities for learning and innovation arise.
The attention to ‘on the ground’ experience does not, however, mean
that broader structural processes are ignored or discounted (Wise &
Velayutham 2009). This is important when investigating food practices
because complex factors including access to economic resources, agedifferentiated nutritional requirements, powerful marketing messages
and increasingly individualized taste preferences inevitably impinge on
both learning and sustaining cooking practices (Bell & Hollows 2007).
One such factor is the migratory flows characterizing the current phase
of globalization which, it has been suggested, have helped broaden food
choices available for consumers in modern cities (James 2005; Wise
2011). As migrant communities establish food businesses to cater for
the tastes and traditions of their own members, the wider population
is also offered opportunities to try food from other cultures. Donna
Gabaccia (1998) points out that mainstream businesses then begin
to offer different food ranges and are quick to commodify ‘exotic’
produce as consumers become more familiar with ‘new’ dishes and
different ways of preparing food. Ahmad Jamal (1996) argues that the
appearance of ‘ethnic’ products in mainstream supermarkets helps
those in the majority culture to adopt products from other cultures
into their cooking. In a recent view of the complex relationships in
multicultural societies, Greg Noble explores the way ‘being together’
is regularly negotiated in practical terms, including via reciprocal
transactions around food (Noble 2009). He suggests that ‘strangeness’
disappears through habitual contact as people are brought together
in ordinary situations such as sporting clubs, schools and community
groups (ibid: 61).
While Warde says curiosity about ‘foreign food’ is a feature of modern
life (1997: 59), Ben Highmore warns that, although attraction to the
food of another culture can be seen as a form of learning it does not
necessarily equate to a positive attitude towards multiculturalism
more generally (2008: 292). Furthermore, Gill Valentine points out
that some types of daily interactions between people from different
groups are not really ‘multicultural encounters’ at all (2008: 326)
and are often cross-cut by uneven power relations of class, gender
and age. In this regard, Ghassan Hage has criticized using food as an
indicator of multicultural interaction as being superficial and even
exploitative (Hage 1997). Hage argues that the experience of dining out
in ethnic restaurants is more often practised to enhance the cultural
capital of the (mostly white and middle class) diners than establishing
any real interconnections between migrants and the mainstream
Helen Benny 603
(1997). For him, the relationship is a distant and distancing one; it is
‘multiculturalism without migrants’ in which extant power hierarchies
in the relationships between the centre and periphery are left
undisturbed (Hage 1997).
And yet, Uma Narayan (1997) argues, an appreciation for the food
of others might be a first step towards deeper recognition: ‘gustatory
relish for the food of ‘Others’ may help contribute to an appreciation
of their presence in the national community, despite ignorance about
the cultural contexts of their foods – these pleasures of the palate
providing more powerful bonds than knowledge’ (cited in Highmore
2008: 391). I want to highlight this point because, as Noble argues, it
is the multidirectional nature of intercultural exchange that is the most
significant characteristic of the evolving ‘diversification of diversity’
in Australia today. He shows that while ‘many long-time Australians
take up the diverse cultural goods made available by cultural diversity,
so too migrants and their children take up elements of the prevailing
Australian ways of life and maintain the diverse traditions and
practices they have brought with them, and create new traditions
and associations’ (Noble 2009: 48, original italics). In this sense,
intercultural exchanges can play an important role for exploring the
dynamics of tradition and innovation within everyday food pedagogies.
What follows illustrates how sharing food with someone from another
cultural tradition can be an introduction to learning about the dense
layers of meaning associated with the food of that culture (Morgan
et al. 2005). This rarely occurs in a vacuum. Intercultural sharing of
food has the capacity to transform interactions between people ‘where
identities are not left behind, but can be shifted and opened up in
moments of non-hierarchical reciprocity, and are sometimes mutually
reconfigured in the process’ (Wise 2009: 23). Shopping, cooking and
swapping recipes are ideal, ‘unthreatening’ ways that intercultural
food exchanges intermesh in daily practice (Duruz 2005) and create
meaningful connections between people (Wise 2011).
The interplay between traditional and innovative food pedagogies
The empirical study described here took place during 2010-2011
and was designed to investigate the resilience of ethnic food cultures
in the face of increasing industrialisation in global food systems.
Participants were recruited in local shops and markets in an inner
suburb of Melbourne. The area has a multicultural ‘feel’ and provides
an ideal space for exploring the ways people are ‘doing togetherness’
(Valentine 2008). In-depth interviews were conducted in 32
households and raised a number of issues covered in the literature
discussed above. The participants were asked to describe how
they learned to cook, who had taught them and what factors most
influenced their ongoing practices. In addition, they were invited to
discuss how they adapted new ideas and practices into their daily
routines.
This section draws on three of the participants, Nadia, Anita and
Simone, and is structured around their responses. I am singling these
three out because they exemplify the two significant themes common
to all the participant’s responses about learning to cook. Firstly,
learning to cook was described as the result of informal, habituated
processes and was principally absorbed through observation of an
older relative, usually a woman, preparing food in the home. This
was the case even amongst those participants, particularly male,
who had not been encouraged to cook from a young age. All of
the participants remembered watching meals prepared and were
able to reproduce the practices when necessary. The second broad
theme was the on-going accumulation of cooking knowledge and
skills influenced by multicultural diversity. While their own cultural
tastes and traditions remained important, the participants also
described everyday interconnections and exchanges with people in
which they were offered opportunities to learn new ways to prepare
food. Most often, these occurred in workplaces, neighbourhood and
friendship networks or through intermarriage. What follows shows
Helen Benny 605
how the women’s cooking regimes incorporated both traditional
and innovative practices which lends weight to arguments from the
literature that learning to cook is a multifaceted process (Short 2006).
Nadia:
Nadia, who identifies strongly as Italian-Australian, is a forty-one
year old, full-time mother with three pre-teen children. Nadia came
to Australia as a child, as did her Macedonian partner who runs
a small second-hand furniture business. Their garden has wellestablished fruit trees and several sizeable vegetable beds but the
kitchen is clearly the centre of most household activities. Well-used
pots and pans are stacked near a large oven, the children’s homework
and newspapers are spread out on the table and a range of cooking
equipment, old and new, occupies the benches. There are no cookery
books in the kitchen and when this is mentioned, Nadia shrugs and
responds that she doesn’t need them. ‘I come from Italy, so I eat lots
of pasta’, she offers, by way of explanation. Nadia begins her interview
by saying:
In the Italian families, everybody cooks! From day one, everybody
cooks… you are with your mum and you cook with her. It’s what
you do.
She goes on to describe her children making gnocchi with her mother:
Of course, it’s their favourite ‘cos they love making them. … So
they go to the shops, they buy the ingredients, they bring ‘em
back. Mum boils the potatoes, she does the semolina, she does the
mashing potatoes; you know it’s the whole process. And they get
the sieve and they make the [gnocchi] and they cook ‘em and they
make the sauce and stuff. It’s the whole day. Not a whole day, but
at least three or four hours of an activity. But that’s just what they
do; especially grandmothers. It’s just what they do.
Nadia’s description of intergenerational transmission of food
knowledge and skills is akin to Sutton’s account of embodied
apprenticeship (Sutton 2001: 134). Her elaboration of her mother’s
gnocchi-making ‘lessons’ with the children shows how closely
the process of learning to cook is connected to both gendered
assumptions underpinning domestic food work and practical skills
acquisition. In this account, the labour-intensity of traditional
cuisines and the assumption that responsibility for it falls to women
appear seamlessly intertwined as ‘just what they do’. However, what
Nadia has articulated here is the way, in some women’s experience,
taken-for-granted expectations about cooking practices come to be
positively inflected as enjoyable tasks. Nadia made it clear that she
enjoys the culinary work she performs for her family and friends, and
describes herself as ‘a bit of a crowd-pleaser’:
Some people feel it’s a chore, I think… But for me it’s an extension
of me, of my kind of caring and sharing. So if you love someone,
you can share what you’ve got.
Nadia’s comments are typical of all the women from the broader
study who did most of the cooking in their households. Rather than
seeing this as ‘false consciousness’ or a rationale employed to disguise
an unequal, unfair division of domestic labour, a view of kitchens
as spaces for celebrations of feminine innovation and power brings
with it the possibility that in spite of the continued lack of recognition
of the ‘workful’ nature of routine domestic cooking tasks (De Vault
1997:183), many women regard cooking as an avenue for creative
expressions of identity. In this view, learning to cook and acquiring
new cooking skills is a form of ‘positive feminine subjectivity’ (Lupton
2000: 185). The current popularity of food shows on television may
have raised the status of cooking and enabled women to claim the
kitchen as a creative space over and above the obligation to provide
family meals (Hollows 2003).
However, earlier incidents in Nadia’s culinary education were not all
positive. She was regularly teased at school for the type of lunches
her mother provided; a former boyfriend refused to eat at her house
Helen Benny 607
claiming he didn’t think it was ‘safe’ to eat homemade salami; she
has repeatedly tried to convince her neighbours that her children,
unlike their own, are fond of garlic and herbs in their food. These are
common experiences raised in discussions of multiculturalism and
illustrate the everyday racism experienced by many migrants when
their food is rejected (Highmore 2008; Valentine 2008).
Nadia also described how her cooking changed through marriage
and travel. She has extended her culinary repertoire as she caters
for her partner’s food preferences which are different from her own
and as she tries to recreate the meals she tasted while overseas.
While discussing these influences, Nadia acknowledged that the
opportunities she had for learning other cuisines was not something
that had been available for her mother:
I don’t think I’m that traditional as my mother… But mum never
really worked, like out of the house so she really kept her ways…
In my mum’s house, we only eat Italian… But I think ‘cos I also
cook like [partner’s] family. Also, I do cook Asian meals. And also
sometimes the Greek comes in there too because you’re here and
there are Greeks everywhere, you know.
Nadia has seen Australian cooking and eating cultures change
throughout her lifetime:
Like, when you go to someone else’s house these days it’s not like
it used to be… They will bring out the ciabatta, they will bring
out the sundried tomatoes, you know? I feel that Italian food has
become part of Melbourne food. It’s like everyone has caffe latte
and everybody has focaccia and everyone eats pasta. Yeah, I think
Italian culture has amalgamated into Melbourne.
The ‘amalgamated’ cultural exchange Nadia describes here is
reminiscent of Noble’s thesis of the multidirectional interactions
between migrants and the mainstream (2009: 48) and of the
importance Hage attributes to home-building practices (1997). The
appearance of food products associated with Italian cuisine such
as sun-dried tomatoes on the shelves of Australia supermarkets
indicates they have become popular with a broad cross-section of the
population. At the same time Nadia expresses pride in the fact that
her traditions have been readily adopted into Australian foodways.
This is one way food traditions, albeit in commodified form in this
example, can be taken up by others and adopted as innovative ways of
exploring other cuisines.
Anita
The second interviewee, Anita, is a single, twenty-six year old
language teacher. Her parents migrated from Italy in the sixties and
worked at the Ford factory until their retirement when they bought a
house with a garden large enough to sustain the family. The kitchen in
Anita’s flat is crammed with preserves and produce from her father’s
garden and she grows a surprising number of vegetables and herbs
in her own tiny courtyard. Anita was born in Australia but regularly
travels to Italy to stay with aunts and cousins and to continue her
language studies. She describes her food traditions as ‘Sicilian’, being
careful to make sure that it is understood as regionally distinct, not
the more general ‘Italian’. When asked who had taught her to cook,
her reply is a pithy summation of the partly unconscious acquisition
of food knowledge referred to by Short as ‘inadvertently gathered
know-how’ (2006: 52): ‘I don’t know, you grow up and it just
happens!’
For Anita, learning to cook was intricately bound up with repetition
and habit (Lupton 1996; Warde 1997). The following extract shows
how this cements traditional dispositions of taste:
I grew up having pasta con salsa, that’s Sicilian. It’s just pasta
and sauce, passata. Every night! That’s like five nights a week.
Saturday we would have our homemade pizza, once again with all
the homemade ingredients. And then Sunday we would have some
leftovers. That was it; that was like the staple diet.
Helen Benny 609
In Anita’s reflection on her mother’s cooking, the importance of
preserving Sicilian recipes was a prominent concern. Her feelings
of custodianship towards the recipes and cooking practices she had
observed as a child were expressed in terms of an anxiety they would
disappear if they fell into disuse. It is notable that Anita mentions
only females as having any responsibility in this regard despite the
fact that her brother and father also cook on occasion:
And now I’m thinking I’ve gotta start taking responsibility! My
nonna died last year… and then there’s my mum and me and my
sister and I’ve got a niece and everything but if we don’t make an
effort to learn these things then they won’t exist ‘cos they are not
written down.
A ‘pedagogy of preservation’ is apparent here. This is evident when
Anita claims that ‘going by feel’ is appropriate for cultural insiders
whereas learning from books opens up the tradition for outsiders.
I approach risotto in the same way as I guess Anglo folks would.
Like, I’m using a recipe book rather than going by feel whereas if
I’m making a pizza or if I’m making pasta, why would I look at a
recipe book? I’ll try different risottos like everyone else.
Anita assumes ‘everyone’ will want to try to find new ways of cooking
because ‘Anglo cuisine doesn’t have too much of an evocative
hold on us’. The ‘acculturation of the mainstream’ to diverse food
cultures also starts to change how ethnic food is perceived; many
foods and cooking styles lose the label ‘exotic’ and become part of a
widely shared and familiar set of meanings (Jamal 1996: 21). This
was alluded to in Nadia’s observations about Italian food becoming
‘amalgamated’ into Australian culinary landscapes and here, it is seen
in Anita’s view that mainstream Australian cooking habits continue to
benefit through cross-cultural exchange of recipes and ingredients.
Her workplace is one site where this occurs. Anita offers her
co-workers simple Sicilian recipes and brings arancini for them to try;
they reciprocate by teaching her something of their cuisine in return:
At work [there are] a lot of Anglo-Aussie women and they have
taken me under their wing and they find it amusing that I won’t
know about these Aussie traditions. Oh my god, they taught me to
make… it was golden syrup dumplings! And I’m like, ‘what?’ Yeah,
but they take great delight in sharing these things.
In exchanges of this kind, the pedagogical encounter moves from the
domestic sphere to a broader, work-place setting where sharing is the
key feature. Learning about food from another culture is not simply
the acquisition of a recipe; it opens up opportunities to learn about
the broader circumstances surrounding cuisines. Such exchanges
do more than inform. They bring people together in ordinary and
everyday instances of ‘people-mixing’ that can lead to establishment
of ongoing relationships through cooking together (Noble 2009: 62).
Simone
Now I turn to an older woman from a different heritage and
generation. Simone, seventy, is an outgoing woman of Anglo-Irish
descent who lives alone in the small semi-detached cottage she bought
once her five children had moved away. Simone relates a cooking
repertoire based on the frugality of a working class upbringing and
her struggle to raise her children alone on a meagre wage. During her
interview, Simone describes the food of her childhood as ‘the classic
English diet of meat and three veg’ and notes that this only started to
change when she became active in political movements in the sixties
and seventies and started to mix with ‘bohemian people’. Simone gave
an account of embodied learning:
I suppose I learnt the basics of cooking from just being there and
watching and helping and cutting up … And I think one of the
difficult parts of cooking and why it is important to watch people
is that a lot of it is about how the stuff looks at certain stages of
preparation. So you know by looking at it that you have mixed
it enough, or that you’ve kneaded it enough or that it’s cooked
enough. So that visual thing, that’s really quite important… and
Helen Benny 611
the cookery books can’t really tell you that. Even the photographs
don’t kind of work.
In the following extract, Simone recounts the effort of recreating a
marmalade that tasted like the one her mother made. This is a task
she now describes as ‘a perpetual chore’ made necessary by the fact
that she cannot find a commercial product as much to her liking as
the one she remembers. Eschewing convenience in favour of flavour
and without a written recipe to guide her, reproducing the taste
involves visualizing how her mother had done it. Importantly here is
that she was not consciously aware that she remembered how to do it.
I think it’s like osmosis. With the marmalade, I didn’t realize that
I knew how to make it until I really sat down and thought ‘Now
this [bought product] is not the marmalade that I want. What
did she do?’ And then I kind of summoned it up… this is the
way my mother made the marmalade and now that’s how I cook
marmalade. The unwritten recipe – and that’s that thing about
seeing something – you know when you look at the fruit that it’s
been boiled enough.
While visualization may be sufficient for reproducing oft-observed
traditional practices, the discovery of food from an unfamiliar cuisine
can be a prompt for learning to cook in innovative ways. Simone
recalls her first experience of dining in a restaurant:
I can remember when I was about eighteen and I was taken
out to dinner and I was taken to one of the first licensed Italian
restaurants in Melbourne… And I can remember what I had – I
had veal scaloppine and I thought, ‘hello, how long has this been
going on?’
Following this discovery of food from outside the ‘classic English
diet’ of her youth, Simone began experimenting with a wider range
of cooking styles. Later, she learnt new recipes largely through
talking to neighbours, ‘especially old people’ and local shopkeepers.
This ‘network’ or ‘neighbourhood pedagogy’ has two interrelated
outcomes: it teaches different ways of cooking and thinking
about food and it builds relationships of respect through creative
experimentation (Morgan et al. 2005).
Italian and Greek food was the first different food that I had and
I owe my neighbours a lot for that. I can remember discovering
olives… And I started, you know, trying things with oil and I
remember the revelation of cooking cabbage with a little bit of oil
and vinegar and what a difference that made.
Today, Simone’s Sri Lankan son-in-law teaches her to cook his
favourite dishes and, while doing so, she learns about different
customs and manners associated with food and eating. Simone’s
previous experience of Sri Lankan cuisine has been from restaurants
or using pre-prepared commercial products; now she is learning from
watching her son-in-law creating dishes at home. There is a reversal
of typical roles here: her age and gender suggest that she would be
the one ‘teaching’ the younger male relative to cook but for Simone,
learning in this way means she must re-situate herself as she takes
part in the food preparation and becomes part of his family life.
I’ve tried doing a few of the Sri Lankan recipes. For example, there
is a beautiful chick pea curry that he makes with all these different
spices. Now, when you taste that, you can’t imagine even thinking
one of those [pre-prepared] bottles is going to give you anything
like it.
Here we see how Simone equates tradition with meals made from
scratch. She values the way learning to make this food teaches her
about traditions, in this case those of her Sri Lankan son-in-law.
On the other hand, it also introduces innovation by extending the
culinary repertoire she can draw on.
Conclusion
Families, schools, travel, workplaces, neighbourhoods and
intermarriage can all be considered as ‘pedagogical spaces’ where
long-lived, culturally distinct culinary skills continue to be practiced
Helen Benny 613
and become sites that provide opportunities for acquiring new
knowledge about food and cooking. The relationship between these
is a dynamic one. For many people, learning to cook traditional
food happens through repeated observation and taking part in daily
routines of meal preparation as seen in the accounts of ‘pedagogies
of preservation’ given by Nadia, Anita and Simone. At the same
time, there are ‘pedagogies of innovation’ taking place. For Nadia,
intermarriage and travel were prompts for her to change her
cooking habits. In Anita’s case, workplace relationships have been
instrumental for showing her different ways of approaching food.
And for Simone, dining out, neighbours and in-laws have led her to
embrace a wider range of recipes.
These women have not jettisoned their ‘own’ ways of cooking or the
traditions they find important. The data presented here suggests that
traditional food knowledge and skills are not disappearing in the face
of increasing industrialization in food systems as Ritzer has suggested
(2008). But the accounts show this is because of effort, learning, and
labour to preserve traditions. These traditions, in turn, become the
ingredients for innovation as co-workers and friends swap traditional
foods in everyday, mundane encounters often missed by popular and
academic accounts. . A person-centred approach (Short 2006) as used
here has shown that our understanding of food pedagogies could be
broadened by paying more attention to pedagogies of preservation
and pedagogies of innovation through what Wise calls ‘micromoments of hopeful encounter’ between people of different ethnicities
(2005: 183).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for
their insightful and instructive comments on earlier versions of this
paper.
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Vallianatos, H & Raine, K 2008, ‘Consuming Food and Constructing
Identities among Arabic and South Asian Immigrant Women’, Food,
Culture and Society, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 355-373.
Warde, A 1997, Consumption, Food and Taste: Culinary Antinomies and
Commodity Culture, Sage, London.
Wise, A 2005, ‘Hope and Belonging in a Multicultural Suburb’, Journal of
Intercultural Studies, vol. 26, no. 1-2, pp. 171-186.
Wise, A 2009, ‘Everyday Multiculturalism: Transversal Crossings and
Working Class Cosmopolitans’, in Wise, A and Velayutham, S (eds),
Everyday Multiculturalism, Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Wise, A 2011, ‘Moving Food: Gustatory Commensality and Disjuncture in
Everyday Multiculturalism’, New Formations, vol. 74, pp. 82-107.
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Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Contact details
Helen Benny is a PhD Candidate at Swinburne University of
Technology in Melbourne. Her research interests include the
sociology of food and everyday multiculturalism. Her thesis
investigates the interplay between tradition and innovation in
everyday cooking and eating practices in a multicultural suburb
of Melbourne. It focuses in particular on how thepersistence
of traditional cooking practices play a role in resisting the
homogeneity found in rationalized global food systems.
Email: hbenny@swin.edu.au
‘Savoir Fare’: Are cooking skills a new morality?
John Coveney
Public Health, School of Medicine, Flinders University
Andrea Begley
School of Public Health, Curtin University
Danielle Gallegos
Faculty of Health, Queensland University of Technology
There has been a recent surge of interest in cooking skills in a
diverse range of fields, such as health, education and public policy.
There appears to be an assumption that cooking skills are in decline
and that this is having an adverse impact on individual health and
well-being, and family wholesomeness. The problematisation of
cooking skills is not new, and can be seen in a number of historical
developments that have specified particular pedagogies about food
and eating. The purpose of this paper is to examine pedagogies on
cooking skills and the importance accorded them. The paper draws
on Foucault’s work on governmentality. By using examples from
the USA, UK and Australia, the paper demonstrates the ways that
authoritative discourses on the know how and the know what about
618 Savoir Fare
food and cooking – called here ‘savoir fare’ – are developed and
promulgated. These discourses, and the moral panics in which they
are embedded, require individuals to make choices about what to
cook and how to cook, and in doing so establish moral pedagogies
concerning good and bad cooking. The development of food literacy
programmes, which see cooking skills as life skills, further extends
the obligations to ‘cook properly’ to wider populations. The emphasis
on cooking knowledge and skills has ushered in new forms of
government, firstly, through a relationship between expertise and
politics which is readily visible through the authority that underpins
the need to develop skills in food provisioning and preparation;
secondly, through a new pluralisation of ‘social’ technologies which
invites a range of private-public interest through, for example,
television cooking programmes featuring cooking skills, albeit it set
in a particular milieu of entertainment; and lastly, through a new
specification of the subject can be seen in the formation of a choosing
subject, one which has to problematise food choice in relation to
expert advice and guidance. A governmentality focus shows that as
discourses develop about what is the correct level of ‘savoir fare’,
new discursive subject positions are opened up. Armed with the
understanding of what is considered expert-endorsed acceptable
food knowledge, subjects judge themselves through self-surveillance.
The result is a powerful food and family morality that is both
disciplined and disciplinary.
Introduction
In his book,The omnivore’s dilemma, Michael Pollan (2007) begins
by asking how was it that, almost overnight, the American idea of
eating ‘healthily’ was revolutionised? Referring to newspaper stories
about the role of high protein, low carbohydrate diets to promote
weight loss, Pollan describes how this idea moved rapidly through the
US food system, garnering support from experts and industry alike,
John Coveney, Andrea Begley and Danielle Gallegos 619
creating new markets for so-called ‘low carb’ foods, increasing sales of
books based on Dr Atkin’s-style high protein diets. The process also
saw a rapid decline in the status of so-called tradition staple foods,
like bread, potatoes and pasta, which were now deemed detrimental
to health.
Pollan believes that this development was only possible because
a culture, like that of the US, has no food tradition of its own. In
other words, when there are no longstanding rules and rituals about
what to eat and when to eat it, people’s diets are at the whim of
whatever popular discourse is served up whether this be from science,
commerce or even journalistic wisdom. In the Australian context,
Symons makes the same point when he describes Australian food
culture as being industrial cuisine and having “a history without
peasants” (Symons, 1982:10).
Pollan’s point is that ‘deep’ food cultures – for example, those of
France and Italy, which have been developed over a long period of
time – are resilient to change, or at least change slowly, such is the
case of the so-called ‘Mediterranean diet’. This resilience to change
comes from a number of sources, including strong anchoring in the
ecological links about what foods can be grown and when, and how
foods are transformed for human consumption using appropriate
food processing methods. Embedded in ‘deep’ food culinary wisdom
is knowledge not just about what to eat, but also how to find food,
prepare it to create a dish and therefore make a meal. Thus the
provisioning of food – food procurement, processing and cooking - is
at the very centre of food cultures, and many cuisines give pride of
place to the longevity of traditional recipes and cooking techniques
as an indication of not only the integrity of food and eating patterns,
but of the culture itself. At the heart of these processes are skills in
cooking. The belief that cooking skills are passed down from one
generation to the next supports a confidence in particular social and
cultural structures which see the domestic sphere as central.
620 Savoir Fare
The purpose of this paper is to examine the salience of cooking skills
and the importance accorded them. It will argue that the centrality
given to cooking becomes most visible when cooking skills are
thought to be declining, or found wanting, limited or inadequate. As
will be shown, a concern for cooking skills in many western cultures
often emerges as a ‘moral panic’ at times when questions are raised
about basic human skills, and even survival itself. Part of this panic
speaks to a belief that without a tradition of cooking family harmony
is at risk and family life is precarious.
The paper begins by demonstrating some examples of where in recent
history, public sentiment has reacted to the idea that cooking skills,
especially those that abide by particular standards, have declined. It
then goes on to examine recent cases where cooking skills have been
addressed in public policy. This examination is important in view of
the current enthusiasm and uncritical acceptance of cooking skills in
health and education sectors.
Theoretically, the paper draws on the work of Michel Foucault,
especially the ideas related to governmentality (Foucault, 1991). By
governmentality, Foucault refers to the emergence of a concern for
the governing of a complex of ‘men and things’. By ‘men and things’,
Foucault is referring to individual and collective wealth, resources,
customs and habits, as well as the consequences of drought, famine
and other calamities. In other words, governmentality has a major
concern with populations, a role we now attribute to the state. Indeed,
Foucault’s point is that governmentality was in fact an art around
which crystallised the organising technologies and concepts of the
modern state. Within governmentality there developed a range of
techniques for knowing the population, and managing it through
that knowledge. So statistical surveys, demography, medicine, and
discourses on sanity and reason were deployed in order to take care
of the population’s health and welfare. The knowledge arising from
these new disciplines are what Foucault describes as ‘technologies of
power’. They demarcate the necessary boundaries of understanding,
endorsing particular certainties and dispelling others. In so doing
they create what Foucault calls ‘regimes of truth’.
However, governmentality does not only mean the government of
others; it also means the government of oneself. In other words,
individuals come to know themselves through discipline and training
that are required by appreciation of particular forms of knowledge
acting as discourse. These ‘technologies of the self’, constitute the
modern subject as one who knows him or herself; the self-reflective,
self-regulating individual. The appropriate forms of ‘technologies of
the self’ made available during the emergence of governmentality
was that administered by the Christian church. According to Hunter
(1994: 37), what happened was that the state inherited the moral
training of the church because of “the cultural scarcity of pedagogical
relationships and disciplines”. In other words, the state adopted
and promoted Christian practices of the self because there was a
rarity of pedagogical models available at the time. Foucault’s point,
and it is one amplified by Mitchell (1994) and Hunter (1994), is that
the new form of political technology ushered in by governmentality
comprised two adjacent but autonomous forms of ‘technologies for
living’. These were “the government of the state, and the Christian
(soon to be humanist) spiritual perfection of the self” (Hunter, 1994:
42). The practices of ‘spiritual’ or ethical perfection multiplied and
spread outside of the ecclesiastical institution and became available
in many modern institutions, the family, the school and the clinic
where they were practised in terms of the ethical comportment of
individuals (Foucault, 1982). In other words, the technologies of the
self, which constitute the modern subject, were appropriated from
practices of the formation of the Christian soul - practices such as
self-observation, self-examination, confession, and self-renunciation
(Petersen, 2003).
622 Savoir Fare
It is within this set of possibilities offered by governmentality that we
can see the emergence of a new subject: the food choosing subject one who needs to acquire particular cooking knowledges and skills to
choose one path over another. As we shall see discourses generated
through nutrition and home management pedagogies produced
technologies of power prescribing what is to be practiced, how and
when. The term ‘power’ is not used here to describe some form
of oppression or domination. It is used to denote a more positive
property; one that provides the necessary rationale to achieve positive
ends prescribed and endorsed by expert understanding. According to
Rose (1990) expert understanding infuses and shapes the personal
investments of individuals, in the ways that they form, regulate and
evaluate their lives, actions and goals. However, in order to “form,
regulate and evaluate their lives, actions and goals” individuals need
to actively apply themselves as self-reflexive subjects with respect to
expert understandings. That is to say, they need to subject themselves
to its authority, its credibility and its integrity. As we shall see,
the imperative of knowing how to prepare and cook food has been
problematised at various stages in a number of western cultures,
providing an opportunity for pedagogical advice and correction on
cooking.
What’s (not) cooking?
The recent interest in cooking skills by a number of scholars
have raised questions about the exact nature of cooking. While
there is some agreement about the fact that cooking involves the
transformation of the state of food – for example, from raw to cooked
– numerous other possibilities present themselves. Does reheating
amount to cooking? Does putting together a meal from pre-prepared
ingredients count as ‘real’ cooking? Or is this merely assembling?
These questions are not of major concern for this paper, but point to
the fact that cooking and the skills required to complete cooking tasks
are currently being problematised.This problematisation is usually
undertaken by experts who privilege cooking from scratch – that
is from basic or raw ingredients – as the gold standard, especially
with respect to fostering improvements in eating behaviours and
ultimately diet quality (Huntley, 2008:97).
This problematisation can be seen in a number of historical
developments that have involved a reconsideration of the quality
of food eaten by individuals and communities. Some of the earliest
examples of an almost evangelistic 19th Century movement
promoting the need to improve cooking skills can be found in the
work of Wilbur Atwater in the USA (Coveney, 2006:61). Atwater is
regarded to be the founding father of nutritional science. Building
upon the popularity of newly arising facts about nutritional
food components, especially energy and protein, Atwater’s work
supported community crusades to spread new knowledge about
food and cooking to households and communities(Crotty, 1995:16).
Community-based movements rallied to take this knowledge of
cooking to towns and cities across the USA. With later government
involvement, the new knowledge was introduced into the school
curriculum, becoming part of US national domestic science initiatives
(Berlage, 1998).The pedagogical priority of domestic science also
became embedded in the school curriculum in the UK (Mennell,
Murcott, and van Otterloo, 1993:89) and Australia (Reiger, 1986:57).
Movements in the UK and Australia were given particular impetus
with the finding from surveys that, by the standards of the new
nutrition discourses, populations were often poorly fed (Coveney,
2006:63). Moreover, the monitoring and surveillance of school
children’s health (New South Wales Department of Public Instruction,
1908) and the examination of physique of army recruits (Winter,
1980) – all of which were believed to be less than satisfactory – gave
strength to the importance of spreading new knowledge of cooking.
A number of publications sprang up to provide knowledge of
cooking with nutrition principles in mind. In the USA a monthly
624 Savoir Fare
magazine, Century Illustrated, provided advice about what to eat
and how to prepare it. At the time, nutrition principles concerned
only the requirements for so-called macronutrients, protein, fat
and carbohydrate. By relating nutrient intake to nutrient need,
Atwater was able to estimate the wisdom of family food purchases.
He related his findings to calculations of spending power and
household budgeting. Thus Atwater was able to calculate nutritious
and economical menus for families, which were published for popular
audiences (Crotty, 1995:18). Atwater regarded fruits and ‘water rich’
green vegetables as unnecessarily extravagant purchases since at the
time there was a limited understanding of the need for vitamins and
minerals (Coveney, 2006:61).
Atwater was very outspoken about the importance of learning the
correct ‘domestic pecuniary economy’ for preparing and eating food,
saying:
The true Anti-poverty Society is the Society of ‘Toil, Thrift and
Temperance’. One of the articles of its constitution demands that
the principles of intelligent economy shall be learned by patient
study and followed in daily life. Of the many worthy ways in which
the charity we shall call Christian is being exercised, none seems
to me more worthy of appellation than the movement in industrial
education of which teaching the daughters of working-people how
to do housework and how to select food and cook it forms a part.
(Atwater, 1888:445).
In the same edition, Atwater strengthens his stand by pointing out “If
Christianity is to defend society against socialism must it not make
such homely, non-theological teachings as these part of its gospel?”
(Atwater, 1888:445). In other words, should not the home, the hearth,
and even the stove be at the very centre of Christian pedagogy?
An important spin-off from Atwater’s work was the development
of the field of domestic science, later known as home economics.
According to Rossiter (1980) American cities at the end of the
nineteenth century, like many in Europe, had major public health
problems, which accounted for a large percentage of mortality and
morbidity. Half of all deaths were children. The need for families to
be taught better hygiene and nutrition appeared to be self-evident.
Thus began a training in science for women who, up to that time had
been prevented from doing scientific research, and domestic science
began as a tertiary degree. Training programmes taught topics such
as cookery, nutrition, hygiene and mothercraft, the pre-requisites
for which were often sciences like chemistry, bacteriology and
psychology. Crotty (1995:23) shows how in Australia, these ideas
spawned a number of cooking and food preparation movements, such
as the Australia Health Society which further popularised food and
nutrition.
Interest in cooking and related skills also reached a peak during times
of necessary thrift and frugality, not only based on household income
but, in the case of World War Two, on national food security. In the
UK in particular, large-scale government information campaigns were
launched to remind the public about the need for basic cooking skills
(Hammond, 1954).Many campaigns were full of information on wise
use of ingredients - many of which were in limited supply – and, as
part of this, a need to reduce food waste (Drummond and Wilbraham,
1994:454). A range of means was used to educate and provide
necessary instructions for preparing what were often ingredients
unfamiliar to British consumers, including a regular morning radio
programme The Kitchen Front that would present information about
cooking in a light-hearted fashion (Coddingham, 2011:392)
The effects of restraint and rationing of ingredients like fat and sugar
were in the end to be of benefit to the British public, even though the
hardship of rations continued until the early 1950s. Indeed, it is now
believed that the population in Britain was at its healthiest during
these times. The transformation is regarded to be responsible for a
policy turn around. Unlike Germany, the British government entered
626 Savoir Fare
the war years believing that the state had no role to play in changing
people’s eating habits. But by the end of 1945 it had changed its mind
believing that government had a primary responsibility to change
attitudes to food and enhance well-being (Coddingham, 2011:385).
Cooking skills in decline
During the latter post war years of the 1960s and 1970s, a national
emphasis on cooking skills fell into decline. This was in part due
to the increased credibility and available of so-called ‘convenience
foods’, which were rapidly becoming features in household diets as
quick ways to serve up meals to families, and the increasing rise of
commentaries which were critical of women’s domestic roles (Attar,
1990; Shapiro, 2004).
It should be noted that the moralisation around women emerging
from the kitchen to paid employment is not a recent phenomenon.
Walton (1992) describes the increased availability of prepared food
(in this case fish and chips) was well received by women but criticised
by health professionals. The consumption of food prepared outside
the home was read as poor mothering, and a breakdown in the
process of policing of ‘proper’ families (Walton, 1992). The same
moral panics can be seen today where the demise of cooking skills,
and of family meals are linked with a rise in fast food and convenience
food consumption, and a rise in childhood obesity. Indeed, the rise
in obesity in children has been linked directly with cooking skills, or
rather, lack thereof (Pidd, 2008).
In Australia the need to teach students about cooking skills was
demoted during the 1960s and 1970s, evidenced by a decision in
many states to stop the training of home economics teachers, who
had until that time been the traditional custodians of the knowledge
and teaching of food and cooking skills (Pendergast, Garvis and
Kanasa, 2011). The positioning of home economics as feminine,
practical and unpaid meant that it had been and continues to be
marginalised particularly in secondary school curricula where a
strong focus is retained on the ‘science’. Even in the development of
national curricula the practical art of cooking is noticeably absent
(ACARA, 2011). These events are viewed as leading to a decline or
deskilling in cooking skills and a move away from cooking from
scratch (Begley and Gallegos, 2010). However, the prominence of
a loss of cooking skills was highlighted in the launch of Australia’s
National Food and Nutrition Policy (FNP) in 1992. The policy
states ‘The role of many women as ‘gatekeepers’ of their family’s
health requires special attention. Women in poverty…may need
improved food skills to obtain good nutrition from foods which they
can afford’ (Commonwealth Department of Health, Housing and
Community Services,1992:5). Thus we see direct reference to the
need to improve cooking knowledge and skills by targeting of the
‘nutrition gatekeeper’. The prominence of the nutrition gatekeeper as
the person, usually female who has primary responsibility or moral
judgment for household food choices, originated from US research
during the 1940s (Mead, 1943). It gained further attention in work
undertaken by Murcott (1982) and Charles and Kerr (1988) who
described the role of women in ensuring “good” food made it to the
table. Women have continued to be the traditional targets in many
FNPs since that time via interventions aimed at making mothers
moral guardians of family food choices. However, as the quote above
suggests, it is low-income groups who are considered most in need
of tutelage where cooking skills are concerned. This arises from the
observation that diet-related diseases are more common in lowincome populations (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare,
2010), and by implication, are a result of a deficit in nutrition
and cooking knowledge. Thus, from what has been said already,
women, as gatekeepers become the primary focus for pedagogical
interventions designed to improve cooking skills and thus the quality
of family meals.
628 Savoir Fare
The purported decline in cooking skills is often conflated with another
observation in many western cultures: the decline in the family meal.
In popular discourse, this refers to the fewer occasions for families
to eat together. A number of claims have been made about the role of
family meals in the health and welfare of children, not least of which
is the assertion that children from families that do not share meals
are more likely to have unhealthy eating habits, more likely to smoke
or drink, and more likely to take part in illegal activities, such as drug
taking (CASA, 2011). The association of family meals and cooking
skills is being complicated, however, by the use of convenience foods
that facilitates the ‘doing’ of cooking to produce family meals (Beck,
2007), and the use of fast food eating occasions as family occasions
(Brembeck, 2005). Whether family meals produced by convenience
actually count as family-oriented events is a matter of debate, given
the importance accorded to meals cooked from scratch (Begley and
Gallegos, 2010).
A number of scholars have questioned the purported decline in family
meals and the decline in cooking skills, mostly on the basis of poor
data or exaggerated claims. Indeed recent Australian data points to
the maintenance of a family meal ideology, albeit transitioning into
a range of diverse forms (Gallegos et al 2011). However, an emphasis
on increasing cooking skills continues as a major theme in many
health promotion programmes. For example, in the Australian Go
for 2&5 fruit and vegetable campaign the targeting of the main meal
preparer and promotion of suitable recipes have been key elements
in the initiative (Pollard, 2009). Also, the recent developments of
Measure up, the Australian Commonwealth Department of Health
and Ageing’s campaign to increase healthy weight, emphasises the
so-called ‘Country Pantry’, where facts sheets with cooking skills
ideas are a central part of message. Cooking skills interventions are
now also seen as the new practical modality for improving individual
eating behaviours as stand-alone techniques coming under the remit
of health agencies and welfare agencies as the focus on low income
families continues. Examples include Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of food
(Adams, 2012), Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen garden (Australian
Federal Government, 2011) and Diabetes Australia’s Need for feed
(Diabetes Australia, 2011).
In summing up so far, cooking skills have been at the centre of a
number of concerns – some would say ‘moral panics’ –not only
about eating habits, but also by implication, the nurturing of family
and family life. These concerns often arise during national priorities
or crises. For example, Atwater’s work on food values was used
extensively by industrialists in the USA, who wanted to show that,
contrary to claims for higher basic wages by trade unions, households
were in fact being paid enough; the solution to poverty was the
optimisation of household expenditure along nutritional guidelines
that emanated from Atwater’s research (Aronson, 1982). A similar
case was made during court hearings in Australia during the debates
in 1920 by unions and employers for a basic living wage (Reiger,
1986). Cooking skills were also highlighted during times of national
crisis, for example during the world wars. While different in nature
from the Atwater-inspired causes, a national obsession during
times of conflict and the battle on the ‘home front’ gave emphasis to
cooking from basics and avoiding waste, and everyone doing their
bit. Coming to the present, it could be said that the new battle is the
preservation of the environment – with a renewed focus on the home
front, growing your own and reducing waste emerging as important
techniques to lessen the impact of climate change (Coveney, 2011).
What is the problem?
The work of Carol Bacchi can provide a useful framework to unpack
the preoccupations that underpinned concerns about food and
cooking during these times. Bacchi seeks to highlight the discourses
that are embedded in the problematisation of social issues and
essentially ask ‘what is the problem represented to be?’ (Bacchi,
630 Savoir Fare
1999). In doing so, Bacchi is not asking for a rendering of the real
problem or the truth of the issue. Instead, she seeks to find out how
the problem being addressed is position and how this positioning
acts to garner public or political support. Bacchi’s work draws on
Foucault’s understanding of the government of conduct, especially
as it is addressed in the seminal work on governmentality (Foucault,
1991).
In relation to the priority given to cooking skills, we can notice a
number of features. Central the problematisation of common food
practices both during theAtwater campaigns in the late 19th Century
and later movements during the world wars is the belief that a certain
kind of knowledge is deficient or entirely missing. That is to say, there
is a lack of so-called ‘savoir fare’, used here to point to practical know
how and know what about food and cooking. For Atwater and related
educational movements which were seeking to increase people’s
understanding of nutrition, this was to some extent understandable;
nutrition discourse itself was a new way of thinking about food, one
predicated on the belief that what mattered most was not the flavour
or the tradition of food, but basic nutritional constituents. Essentially,
people were being asked to re-calibrate their palates so as to not
appreciate foods for flavour or taste or pleasure, but to valorise food’s
nutritional value instead. Atwater is famous for noting that pleasure
of eating is unimportant because even bad tasting food can be shown
to be digestible, metabolisable and therefore of nutritional value to
the body. Of course, unlike traditional cultural understandings of
food and cooking which rely on flavour and taste to indicate quality,
nutritional qualities of food - calories, proteins, carbohydrates etc.
- are not immediately available to the senses. One cannot taste a
calorie. Thus the role of the expert in this discourse is crucial. The
expert provides the necessary knowledge to rationalise food by
exploring and making visible its essential nutritional ingredients. This
rationality leads, literally, to rationing: within a nutritional discourse,
food is portioned out on the basis of calculated physiological needs
which have been carefully measured and quantified.
Atwater’s work was entirely consistent with the priorities of his
day. The need to understand the thermodynamics of a system, its
energy flows, and mechanical advantages were part of the nineteenth
century industrialisation of everyday life. Machines powered by steam
were increasingly used as substitutes for human labour, and the
calibration of expenditure of energy conversion was a requirement
if cost/benefits were to be realised. Three areas of research were
of importance: first, establish relationship between gas exchange
and heat production; second, evaluate foods in relation to energy
requirements and expenditure; and third, establish the causes of
energy expenditure (Johnson, Ferrell and Jenkins, 2003)
Atwater’s work was the first to show that the human physiological
system, fuelled by food energy, obeys the same thermodynamic
principles as the steam engine and the Spinning Jenny: energy is
neither created not destroyed but is converted from one form to
another. In this case it was energy in food, released as energy for
physical work. Atwater’s projects were able to include research on
protein, pioneered by Justus Von Liebig and other scientists in
Germany,who were examining the composition foods (Rossiter, 1975).
Thus the creation of this new knowledge of populations, and its use in
making feeding more efficient, was central to the problematisation of
the ways in which people chose food at that time.
The focus on cooking skills in the UK and Australia during world wars
also emphasised food and cooking pedagogy, but with had different
focus. Here the importance was to remind households of the need
to be frugal and thrifty. During the Second World War in particular,
a UK propaganda campaign was waged by a Ministry of Food
(Drummondand Wilbraham, 1994:448) and it emphasised cooking
skills that ‘made more with less’. Nutrition was featured as part of
632 Savoir Fare
this, as was waste. Indeed, reducing waste became a national priority
with the creation of the UK Nutrition and Food Conservation Branch,
Food Distribution Administration. The role of the Food Distribution
Administration was to reduce waste in the food system and conduct
public awareness campaigns through “…the press, radio, civic and
women’s organizations, trade groups and other outlets. The object
of these efforts is to save every savable bit of food” (Kling, 1943). A
pedagogy developed to remind consumers that it was at the level
of the household that waste saving was mostly possible and, with a
strong reference to earlier Victorian values, it was noted that “In this
time of need, the Nation may well again practice the prudence of its
forebears” (Kling, 1943).
Cooking skills as governmentality
The common feature that binds the examples given is the way in
which the discourses being propagated constructs subjects who are
now required to make choices. That is to say, the use of knowledge
being generated is predicated on the individual choosing one path
over another, with respect to the food they eat. And while this choice
may be seen in the form of a freedom to choose, in fact it is a form of
control that arises directly out of the problematisation of what, at an
earlier time, did not require consideration or reflection. People mostly
ate what had been part of their social milieu and endorsed by their
social class.
The technologies of power, which is one armature of Foucault’s
concept of ‘governmentality’, were generated through the
development through Atwater’s work on nutritional discourses.
These discourses not only prescribed what foods were regarded to
be nutritious but the cooking skills needed to maximise health and
wellbeing. The development of state funded programmes to support
domestic economy movements in the USA, UK and Australia in
the early part of 20th Century promulgated the new knowledge as
‘regimes of truth’.
However, as has been pointed out (Santich, 1995), nutrition
discourses tend to produce a good/bad dichotomy, arising out of
what is nutritionally good, (i.e., nutritionally sound) to eat, thus
eating healthy foods tends to become a virtue, a better moral choice.
Similarly, discourses around frugality and parsimony in food
preparation tend to emphasis what is right, proper and correct in
terms of efficiency and thrift. Conversely, within these discourses are
inevitable notions of ‘bad’, ‘profligate’ or ‘wasteful’ or less morally
worthy practices. The morality brought to bear on food and eating
through the dichotomisation of good/bad has a long history in
western culture. Nineteenth century nutritional proselytisers like
Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg in the USA used the
idea of correct eating habits as a platform for promoting a food
morality: eating good food leads to good character. Even the founder
of Methodism, John Wesley, used healthy food choice to support
his ministry (Turner, 1992: 191). Thus the subjectifying effects of
discourses on food perpetrated beliefs about morality and the selfworth of subjects: the ‘good’ or the ‘bad’ eater. And so the second
armature of Foucault’s ‘governmentality’, the technologies of the
self, is realised in the self-reflection by individuals on what for them
is good to eat, not only from a nutritional viewpoint but also from a
moral perspective.
Within the present context which promotes the desirability of cooking
skills, the moralisation of subjects continues with respect to good
and bad cooking; good cooking is cooking at home from scratch and
bad cooking is reconstituting/reheating and outsourcing the cooking
‘work’. It should be of no surprise that the majority of governmentsponsored cooking skills programmes are aimed at low income,
socially disadvantaged populations who are required to improve
634 Savoir Fare
their knowledge of what is right and proper to eat. In Australia,
food programmes like Food cent$ (Foley and Pollard, 1998) target
low-income groups and furnish them with ideas about cooking on
a budget and are commonly delivered by welfare organisations. In
many ways these programmes rehearse those initially propagated
more than 100 years ago by the Atwater movement. However,
modern programmes also emphasis the idea that cooking skills and
the resultant fare can create communality and thus bond family units
together.
The fundamental necessity of cooking skills, and related tasks,
have however turned towards a broader audience, supported by an
understanding that cooking skills are, in fact, life skills (Lang and
Caraher, 2001). The importance given to this understanding can be
seen in programmes targeting young children (Burgess-Champoux,
2009). For example, the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden
programme in Australia is nationwide, supported by over 12.5 million
dollars of public funding. According to the website, the aim of the
programme is “The creation and care of a Kitchen Garden [which]
teaches children about the natural world, about its beauty and how to
care for it, how best to use the resources we have, and an appreciation
for how easy it is to bring joy and wellbeing into one’s life through
growing, harvesting, preparing and sharing fresh, seasonal produce”
(kitchengardenfoundation.org.au/). The website points out that by
taking part in the programme, children learn skills in gardening and
cooking that will last them a lifetime.
In Australia there are also propositions to reintroduce home
economics into the national school curriculum by positioning cooking
skills as life skills (Home Economics Institute of Australia, 2010).
Furthermore, a new discursive elaboration of cooking-as-lifeskills
has developed with the arrival of ‘food literacy’, taken to mean “the
capacity of an individual to obtain, interpret and understand basic
food and nutrition information and services as well as the competence
to use that information and services in ways that are health
enhancing” (Kolasa et al, 2001).
Thus the primacy accorded to cooking skills, once the province
of the homemaker, or the ‘gatekeeper’, has now spread to include
children and men (Szabo, 2011). The actual penetration of this
more democratic rendering remains to be seen, however. Men and
increasingly children still retain control over food preferences but
women still undertake the bulk of the labour (Santich, 1995), even
though the skills of cooking have supposedly become essential
lifelong skills for all. Cooking skills have thus acquired a sense of
morality, with them we become ethical subjects, with concern for our
health and wellbeing; without them survival is precarious and life
is risky. This is particularly true when low levels of skill in cooking
and thus fewer home-cooked meals challenges the assumed loss of
commensality, and shared family time. The consequences for the
health and welfare of children, in particular, are thought to be dire.
Embedding the imperative of cooking skills within the discourse
of health literacy provides a powerful lever for further pedagogical
engagement with wider audiences. Now that cooking is seen as a
‘life skill’, it falls on a broad section of the population to acquire the
necessary knowledge and associated competencies to provide the
right and proper food. These pedagogies are not only needed to secure
health, but also to maintain overall happiness. Thus good cooking
becomes the ethical responsibility of all, just as the acquisition of
good health – or as Crawford (1980) puts it, ‘healthism’ - has become
the responsibility of each and all, not only to secure individual wellbeing, but also in order to secure a good society. Warin (2011) shows
how for cooking this is played out in Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of food
project, which, while seeking to empower individuals through the
provision of cooking skills, essentially ‘responsibilisise’ them within a
636 Savoir Fare
neoliberal discourse of model, and indeed moral, citizenship.
We can use the work of Rose (1996:54) to summarise the ways in
which the emphasis on cooking knowledge and skills has ushered in
new forms of government. Firstly, the relationship between expertise
and politics is readily visible through the authority that underpins the
need to develop skills in food provisioning and preparation. Experts
have shown how low levels of cooking skills may lead to a reliance on
pre-prepared foods which put at risk health and wellbeing and family
time (Devine, 2002). Thus then need to create dishes and meals from
basics, especially fresh ingredients, is now a requirement receiving
strong support from the state and aligned groups. Secondly, a new
pluralisation of ‘social’ technologies has opened up which invites
a range of private-public interests. The proliferation of television
cooking programmes demonstrates an intense public interest in
cooking skills, albeit it set in a particular milieu of entertainment
and even competition (de Solier, 2005). The partnership between
broadcast industries and supermarkets creates new investment
of private capital. While supermarket chains are no strangers to
television channels, mostly through advertising and marketing, the
opportunities through endorsement of foods from celebrity chefs
opens up a new set of private sector possibilities. More broadly,
state involvement in cooking skills can be seen in the investment in
various programmes designed to improve diet. Televised cooking has
privileged the masculinity of celebrity chefs over the domestic female
construction of cooking (Swenson, 2009; Hollows, 2003). These
are often manifested in the development of cookbooks and recipes
that accompany campaigns that are aimed to improve diet. Often
this requires the collaboration of government with private interests,
for example, the fruit and vegetable or other food industry partner.
Lastly, a new specification of the subject can be seen in the formation
of a cooking subject, one that has to problematise food choice in
relation to expert advice and guidance about what and how food is
to be cooked. As we have seen, the cooking subject was once gender
specific. However, with the belief that knowledge of cooking is a now
a life skill for all there is an obligation to broaden the scope of who is
required to cook and under what circumstances.
A governmentality ‘lens’ shows that as discourses about what is the
correct level of ‘savoir fare’, or food savvy, abound, new discursive
subject positions are opened up. Thus while nutrition ushered
in a food choosing subject, one that had to choose one food over
another on the basis of nutritional calibration and calculation, the
development of ‘savoir fare’ introduces another layer of subjectivity.
That is to say, subjects who are food savvy not only know what is
scientifically in food (nutrients, etc.), and properties, but also when
and under what conditions food should be cooked. They are required
to be food literate in every sense. Armed with the understanding of
what is considered expert-endorsed acceptable food knowledge, both
qualitatively and quantitatively, and what food is right for health
and wellbeing, subjects judge themselves through self-surveillance
(Warin, 2011). The result is a powerful food morality that is both
disciplined and disciplinary.
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About the authors
John Coveney is Professor in the Discipline of Public Health and
Associate Dean in the School of Medicine at Flinders University,
Adelaide, South Australia. His teaching and research includes public
health nutrition, food policy, and health promotion. Most recently
642 Savoir Fare
his research, funded by the Australian Research Council, has
examined Australian consumers’ trust in the food supply.
Andrea Begley is Lecturer and program leader for Nutrition and
Dietetics in the School of Public Health at Curtin University, Perth,
Western Australia. Her recent research has focussed on the role of
cooking skills in health promotion programmes in Australia.
Danielle Gallegos is an Associate Professor in the School of
Exercise and Nutrition Sciences, Faculty of Health, Queensland
University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Her research
interests concern public health nutrition, food literacy, food security
and nutrition in the early years of childhood.
Contact details
John Coveney, Public Health, School of Medicine, Flinders
University, Adelaide, SA, 5001.
Email: head.fppphc@flinders.edu.au
Andrea Begley, School of Public Health, Curtin University, Bentley,
WA.
Email: A.Begley@curtin.edu.au
Danielle Gallegos, Faculty of Health, Queensland University of
Technology, Kelvin Grove, Queensland.
Email: danielle.gallegos@qut.edu.au
NOTES FOR INTENDING CONTRIBUTORS
1
Papers are to be sent to Jacqui Ralley, Adult Learning Australia, PO Box 298, Flinders
Lane, Melbourne VIC 8009, Australia. Phone: 03 9652 0861. Fax: 03 9652 0865. Email:
info@ala.asn.au.
2 Submission of an electronic copy of a contribution is preferred, with one paper copy
posted, against which the electronic print-out may be checked for accurate layout.
3 The paper should not exceed 5,500 words in length. The paper (and its title) is to be clearly
typed on one side only of A4 paper.
4 Authors are also to submit, separately from the paper:
(a) the title of the article (repeated), name(s) of the author(s) and your institutional
affiliation(s);
(b) an abstract of between 100 and 150 words;
(c) a five-line biographical note on present position and any information of special
relevance such as research interests;
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fax numbers; and
(e) a clear indication of whether you want your paper to be refereed (that is, blind peer
reviewed by at least two specialist reviewers from Australia and/or overseas)—if there
is no indication, the paper will be considered as a non-refereed contribution.
5
Any complex tables, figures and diagrams are to be supplied in camera-ready copy, on
separate sheets with an indication of the appropriate location in the text.
6 Authors are to follow the style used in this issue of the Journal. Footnotes should not be
used. References should be indicated in text with the author(s), the year of publication
and pagination, where necessary, in parentheses; for example, Jones (1998), or (Collins
1999:101). References are then listed in full, including pages, at the end of the paper in
consistent form; for example,
for books:
Athanasou, J. (ed.) (2008). Adult education and training, Terrigal,
NSW: David Barlow Publishing.
for articles: Hamer, J. (2010). ‘Recognition of prior learning—Normative assessment
or co-construction of preferred identities?’, Australian Journal of Adult
Learning, 50(1): 98–113.
for chapters: Newman, M. (2009). ‘Educating for a sustainable democracy’, in Willis,
P, McKenzie, S & Harris, R (eds.) (2009), Rethinking work and learning:
Adult and vocational education for social sustainability, Dordrecht,
Netherlands: Springer: 83–91.
7
Papers are accepted on the understanding that they are not being considered for
publication elsewhere. Authors of main papers accepted for publication in the Journal will
receive one copy of the Journal and five reprints of their paper. Other authors will receive
two reprints of their contribution.
8 Brief research reports and book reviews (of approximately 800 words) relating to adult
learning would be welcomed.
9 Some issues of the Journal are thematic. While papers published in a particular issue are
not restricted to the theme, intending contributors are encouraged to submit papers on
themes announced from time to time.
AJAL is indexed and abstracted in the Thomson Reuters product and custom information
services:
• Social Sciences Citation Index ®
• Social Scisearch ®
• Journal Citation Reports/ Social Sciences Edition
419 Introduction: Why food? Why pedagogy? Why adult education?
Guest editors: Rick Flowers and Elaine Swan
Refereed articles
Jo Pike and Deana Leahy
460 Throw your napkin on the floor: Authenticity, culinary tourism, and a
pedagogy of the senses
484 A critical race and class analysis of learning in the organic farming
movement
Catherine Etmanski
507 Food pedagogies in Japan: From the implementation of the Basic Law on
Food Education to Fukushima
Cornelia Reiher
532 Pedagogies of doing good: Problematisations, authorities, technologies and
teleologies in food activism
573 Educational alternatives in food production, knowledge and consumption:
The public pedagogies of Growing Power and Tsyunhehkw
Pierre Walter
595 When traditions become innovations and innovations become traditions in
everyday food pedagogies
Helen Benny
617 ‘Savoir fare’: Are cooking skills a new morality?
John Coveney, Andrea Begley and Danielle Gallegos

australian journal of adult learning

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